USC women’s basketball is developing a very special season. It’s early, but the signs are there. The Trojans have to be very encouraged about their results and their progress through five games.
When a college basketball team begins its season in early November, it knows there will be bumps in the road. Especially in this new era of the transfer portal, with reconfigured rosters and players learning how to play together, November is a month in which teams are going to struggle at some point.
When a team endures an injury to an important starter, the rotations are changed. Players play different amounts of minutes at different positions. We have seen this with the USC men’s basketball, which has not had Kobe Johnson for multiple games and has dealt with injury absences for Boogie Ellis and D.J. Rodman as well. USC lost when Johnson and Ellis were not on the floor. This is part of the November reality for teams without a ton of depth.
Wednesday night against Penn State, USC’s high-octane offense ran into problems due to the injury absence of Kaitlyn Davis. While JuJu Watkins and Rayah Marshall are the big statistical producers on this team, Davis does the things that don’t show up in the box score. She screens, she makes connecting passes, she helps facilitate the movements and actions in the offense. USC really missed Davis, whose injury has her listed day-to-day and is not believed to be severe.
USC players predictably struggled without Davis on the floor. Everyone had to adjust. Players had to exist in new roles and carry out some of the tasks Davis normally would handle. The result was a 20-turnover night for USC, with JuJu Watkins giving up seven of those turnovers and Penn State cashing them in for easy baskets. USC trailed by six points with two minutes left.
This kind of game was a worst-case scenario. Everything which could go wrong did … in the first 38 minutes. Great teams find a way to pull these wins out of the fire.
USC, with two perfect defensive minutes to close the game, finished with a 7-0 JuJu Watkins run to beat the Nittany Lions 71-70.
USC didn’t merely win; it won on a night when the team didn’t function well. It won on a night when the Trojans were shorthanded. It won on a night when Watkins struggled against on-ball pressure.
All wins are great, but this is the kind of win which can both teach a lot of lessons and still build confidence. Players struggled but fought through the difficulties to prevail and come back. Great teams, teams which get very high seeds in the NCAA Tournament, win these kinds of games. This game could really pay off in a dogfight against Utah, UCLA, or the other top teams in the Pac-12 in January and February. If USC wins enough of those games in a loaded Pac-12 Conference, the Trojans will have a top-three seed in the 2024 Women’s NCAA Tournament.
Assuming Kaitlyn Davis comes back into the lineup and doesn’t have persistent injury problems, this team is going to be so tough and resilient that it is poised to become one of the tougher outs in women’s college basketball.
There is so much reason to be encouraged about the overall evolution of this team through the first five games of the young season. Lindsay Gottlieb and Beth Burns have a chance to create something very special.
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