The USC Trojans men’s basketball team got nothing from its bench on Saturday against Oregon State, just three points from four different players. The USC women’s basketball team doesn’t have a terrifically deep bench, either. Only six players played extended minutes in the double-overtime loss to Arizona one week ago, and it’s fairly common for only seven players to play at least 10 minutes in any given USC game this season. Only six players played at least 10 minutes on Friday against Oregon.
Yet, over the course of a long season, a team is going to need at least a few contributions from its bench — not every game, but certainly in a few moments when the starters aren’t shooting well and Plan A isn’t working.
Sunday afternoon, Clarice Akunwafo stepped out of the shadows to provide one of the biggest plays of USC’s season.
The Women of Troy defeated Oregon State with a big assist from Akunwafo, an 11-minutes-per-game player who was thrown into the fire of overtime against the Beavers.
With USC clinging to a tenuous 57-56 lead, Akunwafo grabbed an offensive rebound and scored a putback basket with 32 seconds remaining to help the Trojans beat OSU, 60-56. Akunwafo scored just two points in her 18 minutes, but she made the biggest play of the day. That’s the kind of play winning teams make. It’s the kind of play NCAA Tournament teams make.
It’s why the Women of Troy are now getting very close to the Big Dance.
USC’s bench scored eight points on Sunday — that’s not a lot, but in a close, low-scoring game, it still stood out. When one realizes that the USC men scored only three bench points in a game they lost by three points on Saturday, eight points becomes a lot bigger.
The USC women got the extra five bench points the men didn’t get.
That’s why the women are just about to make the NCAAs, and the men have fallen toward the middle of the bubble into a much more precarious and uncertain situation.
Coach Lindsay Gottlieb is only in Year 2 of her tenure at USC. Building bench depth won’t happen instantly. Yet, we have seen Rokia Doumbia make important bench contributions recently. The coaching staff is squeezing enough production out of its thin bench to give the starters help in crucial moments.
This is how a team takes the next big step in its evolution. Clarice Akunwafo just became a much bigger part of the success story the Women of Troy are writing this year.
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