GNN #10: Notre Dame dominates early and late in signature win at Southern Cal

Niele Ivey’s Irish squad never trailed Saturday and led by as many as 21 in a dominant 74–61 road win at No. 3 Southern Cal

Hey, Saturday was fun!

I think all of us who follow this program knew a performance like that could be in the cards, but it’s really great to see it all come together on such a big stage. Plenty of basketball ahead for this Notre Dame team, and I suspect the quality of this team is no longer a secret, but it’s a huge step forward for Niele Ivey and this Notre Dame program.

Notre Dame doesn’t have to dominate the full 40 minutes to win easily

If you’re trying to put a positive spin on Saturday as a Southern Cal fan, you’ll point to the Trojans cutting Notre Dame’s lead to just 3 in the third quarter, but man … that really feels like grasping at straws.

I think a lot about game states in basketball — it’s pretty core to my belief that momentum is a thing, but more in a “it’s harder to score when you’re constantly taking the ball out of your own basket” way. Looking at the game flow of Saturday, I think you can largely split the game into four phases:

1. An opening segment that Notre Dame dominated

2. A middle-game slog that ebbed and flowed, but largely let Southern Cal close the gap

3. A late-game blitz that Notre Dame dominated

4. A garbage-time flurry from Southern Cal to make the final deficit look better

Put another way … Southern Cal’s good phases were fine enough, but Notre Dame’s were dominant. It’s the sign of a really good basketball team, and one that bodes really well for success in March — matching Notre Dame for 30 minutes doesn’t do you much good if you get blown out in the other 10.

Also worth keeping in mind: Notre Dame did this without Liza Karlen and Maddy Westbeld! While the Irish got great performances throughout the mostly six-deep rotation — shoutout Liatu King for what I thought was a great effort against Kiki Iriafen, foul trouble aside — it’s kind of scary to think what more Notre Dame could have done with a deeper rotation.

Sonia Citron had an all-time ball-knower’s performance

Check the box score, and you’d be forgiven for thinking Sonia Citron had an underwhelming day — after all, we don’t normally praise players who put up just 9 points on 3-for-10 shooting to go with 3 rebounds. The Irish wing’s performance, though, was the key to not just Notre Dame’s dominant win, but in Niele Ivey and her staff’s defensive masterpiece.

JuJu Watkins ended Saturday’s game 10-for-25 from the field, but sat at just 6-for-20 when the Irish scored to go ahead 70–49 with 2:50 left in the game. While Citron, who had the lead assignment on Watkins most of the game, wasn’t solely responsible for largely shutting down the Trojans’ star, she deserves her flowers as much as anyone in the program from Saturday’s contest.

Look, I understand why Citron hasn’t gotten more national narrative love over the course of her Notre Dame career (well, except from Debbie Antonelli two years ago in the most bizarre way). What I don’t understand is why she hasn’t gotten more love from most WNBA draft analysts.

If I’m a WNBA general manager looking to build a championship team, Citron is exactly the type of player I’d be looking to get onto my roster. She’s a great on- and off-ball defender, is a legitimately good scorer on the offensive end, provides legitimate versatility, etc. For me, she’s a lottery pick in the upcoming draft without much hesitation — and I just don’t really get why I’ve seen mock drafts that have her outside the first round.

Mark Schindler wrote some really good stuff about Citron’s defensive performance Saturday, if you’d like to dive a little more in on that topic.

The perils of setting narratives based on projection, not reality

Prefacing everything I’m about to say here with the fact that it’s still November, and really, very little of this matters until late March. But it would be great if the women’s basketball media as a whole changed the way they cover and promote this sport.

Going into Saturday’s game, the narrative around Southern Cal was about how the Trojans had all this talent and were a clear national title contender. Over the course of the day yesterday, it shifted — JuJu Watkins doesn’t have enough talent around her, the team needs time to gel, etc.

Maybe we shouldn’t be ranking teams at No. 3 in November that have such huge and obvious question marks?

There’s a very real chance that Southern Cal gels over the next few months and enters the NCAA tournament in March as one of the legitimate top contenders. But trying to push them as that at this stage in the season never really made sense to me — before the year, I had questions and wanted to see it play out in reality before making those declarations. The fact is, there was at least a huge gulf between Southern Cal and Notre Dame on the floor Saturday, something I really didn’t think was shocking.

Really though, more than anything, it’s reflective of a trend in women’s basketball media that’s bugged me for some time. While I understand why NBC would want to promote Watkins and Southern Cal as a rights-holder to Big Ten games, it boggles my mind how little effort ESPN puts into promoting really … anything beyond Connecticut and Southern Cal right now. It stifles the growth of the game when you open the ESPN app the day after Notre Dame dominates Southern Cal, and the lead story associated with the score is still “Welcome to JuJu Watkins, the next face of women’s basketball”.

It’s lazy coverage, and it was lazy coverage last year when Watkins was pushed all season as the clear freshman of the year favorite over Hannah Hidalgo. In Notre Dame, ESPN actually has the rights to the sport’s two most exciting players between Hidalgo and Olivia Miles. It’s beyond time we move past the “UConn and [X] are the only things that matter” way of covering women’s basketball.

Odds and ends

• As much as anything, I thought Saturday showed the value of Notre Dame’s high-end talent depth, an element that not many teams — and especially not Southern Cal — can match. Most teams can’t pull off the game plan Niele Ivey put in because most teams don’t have two projected lottery picks in this year’s draft, a reigning first-team All-American, and then also players of Liatu King, Cassandre Prosper, and Kate Koval’s calibre.

• Did not want to rant about this too much, but it was really nice to see Hannah Hidalgo and Olivia Miles confirm my “freshman of the year should’ve been much more of a race than it was” and “Kiki Iriafen should not be penciled in as the No. 2 pick” priors.

• Related to each of the previous, Hidalgo and Miles combined for 44 points, 15 assists, 14 points, and 8 steals in the win. Having two great point guards is probably good, actually!

• I don’t just love that Miles is shooting it so well from deep this season, I love the confidence with which she’s hitting from deep. Pretty cool that she now has “starts backpedaling to play defense while the ball is in the air because she knows it’s in” 3s in her arsenal.

• Really good effort from Cassandre Prosper, who made her presence known pretty quickly Saturday with a nice drive to give the Irish the lead for good at 8–6. I really liked that small lineup with Prosper in for Kate Koval in places, which could be a counter available to Notre Dame against teams with strong posts.

• Speaking of teams with strong posts, huge win for U.C.L.A. yesterday over South Carolina. If Connecticut is ranked ahead of either the Bruins or Irish today when the polls come out, I’m going to scream.

• Feel like there were a lot of great metaphors throughout Saturday, but I really love using the Southern Cal public address/in-game fan combo as one. Can’t think of a better comparison between the vibe of these two programs than a P.A. announcer starting an airball chant in a game his team loses by double digits.

• Big week ahead to make this win stick for Notre Dame, with T.C.U. on Friday and Utah on Saturday in the Caymans. Unfortunately, FloHoops has the rights to this little event. I would like to propose a new rule that we don’t play in holiday events whose games are televised by a ridiculously expensive streaming service that doesn’t offer a free trial and also does not have a great reputation for performance.

Anyway, enjoy the holiday season! Will probably offer some thoughts on the T.C.U. matchup later this week, as the Irish get to see old friend Hailey Van Lith for the first time in a little while.