Championship basketball runs primarily through players such as JuJu Watkins, who put a team on their back and own the biggest moments in crunch time. Watkins’ 51 points against Stanford carried USC and provided the best single-game performance of the women’s college basketball season. However, USC would not have won this game without McKenzie Forbes, a role player who stepped up in a moment of crisis.
USC had led Stanford by a double-digit margin, but three Trojans fouled out and the Women of Troy were both shorthanded and outsized late in the fourth quarter. The three players who fouled out — Rayah Marshall, Clarice Akunwafo, and Kaitlyn Davis — are USC’s primary frontcourt players with the size, length, and power to handle Stanford’s frontcourt. The Marshall-Akunwafo-Davis trio contained Stanford superstar Cameron Brink and emerging forward Kiki Iriafen. Neither Brink nor Iriafen felt comfortable at the offensive end of the floor. Both players shot poorly against the Trojans’ frontcourt defense.
However, with all three Trojans unavailable, USC was undersized and limited. Bench players were thrown into the fray. Defensive assignments changed. When Stanford cut a large deficit down to just two points, at 58-56, with only two minutes left, it was reasonable to think that USC would run out of gas and get caught just before the finish line.
McKenzie Forbes (not just JuJu) would not let that happen.
In the next 90 seconds, Forbes made a basket, grabbed a defensive rebound, and then collected an offensive board to lead to a JuJu made free throw to push that tenuous two-point lead to seven, at 63-56, essentially sealing the game. USC could have panicked. It also could have wasted Watkins’ incredible display. Forbes made the blue-collar plays to ensure the Trojans won on JuJu’s big night.
JuJu is the straw that stirs the drink for this team. No one denies that. However, the role players have to come up big in important moments if this team is going to make a deep run in March. McKenzie Forbes came to the rescue in USC’s hour of need.
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