GNN #14: Notre Dame’s 3-point barrage downs North Carolina
Niele Ivey’s Irish team beat North Carolina for the first time in three years Sunday to move to 3-0 in the ACC.
Hi! It’s been a little while since we talked — the holiday season always gets a little busy, but it’s been a great few weeks for Notre Dame. The Irish cemented a pretty comfortable win over Connecticut, put a 28–0 run on Virginia to end the game well before halftime, and then went down to Chapel Hill for a 10-point win at ranked North Carolina. Oh, and got Liza Karlen and Maddy Westbeld back from injury.
Thursday’s visit from Wake Forest somehow already marks the halfway point of the Notre Dame regular season. Kinda crazy, honestly?
Welcome back, Maddy Westbeld!
Through a non-conference slate that featured wins over Southern Cal, Texas, and Connecticut, it was almost easy to forget Notre Dame was without fifth-year stalwart Maddy Westbeld. While I’ve loved seeing her, K.K. Bransford, and Kylee Watson get in on the sideline fit game together all season, it just felt right to see Westbeld back in an Irish uniform Sunday.
Westbeld didn’t do much beyond getting reacclimatized a bit during her 13 minutes Sunday — it’s pretty cool she didn’t really need to — but her return alongside Liza Karlen’s growing role gave us a bit of insight into what we can expect from Notre Dame’s rotations for the rest of the year. Liatu King (35 minutes) was the only Irish big over the 20-minute mark, with Liza Karlen finishing a smidge under that and Kate Koval playing a season-low 12 minutes.
While I hope Koval can get big minutes in the fourth quarter of a few ACC matchups coming up with Georgia Tech the only likely conference title contender on the rest of the January schedule, it’s not a bad thing for her development to be able to be thrust into more right situations and fewer necessary ones. The learning curve as a freshman post can be pretty steep at this level, and “situational defensive impact” feels like a great place to mesh where she’s at now with Notre Dame’s title aspirations.
Westbeld’s return gives Niele Ivey more options, too. While I expect the Irish to gravitate to playing Westbeld and King alongside Hannah Hidalgo, Olivia Miles, and Sonia Citron as the default five in a four-shooter lineup (more on that in a minute) that eschews a true center, Notre Dame could also go big, pairing Westbeld or Karlen with King and Koval for periods to stymie post-oriented squads.
Notre Dame has kinda made me look like an idiot
I swear there was some logic behind my concern about Notre Dame’s perimeter shooting coming into the season. Olivia Miles and Cassandre Prosper carried real question marks from behind the arc, both Liatu King and Kate Koval have still never taken a 3 in their college careers, and with Liza Karlen and Maddy Westbeld sidelined early, we knew the Irish were going to have to put those four on the floor together fairly regularly.
It’s why Notre Dame’s 3-point shooting has been so astounding to me.
Despite missing their last four attempts, the Irish shot 13-for-21 from deep in Sunday’s win at North Carolina, boosting their season 3-point percentage to 44.3%. Filtering to just games against Division I opponents as Bart Torvik’s analytics do, the gap between the Irish and second-placed Southern Indiana (39.9%) is as big as the gap between the Screagles and 39th-placed George Mason.
Miles’ transition from a minor liability behind the arc to a sniper with swagger has understandably carried the headlines, but we’ve seen an across-the-board improvement from deep out of the Irish guards and wings. Hannah Hidalgo’s 46% mark from 3 is a huge leap from a solid 34% as a freshman, Sonia Citron is back up to 40% from deep, matching the last time she played alongside Miles, and Prosper has been a sneaky weapon from deep, shooting 10-for-27 on the year. Throw in Emma Risch’s steady 43% shooting from 3 when she sees the floor, and Notre Dame has been a juggernaut from deep.
It’s sometimes hard to separate signal from noise with 3-point shooting in particular, and while there’s likely some regression to the mean out there, it’s hard to argue that a fair bit of this isn’t just who the Irish are. It’s not just the improvement in Miles’ shot, but a downstream improvement in the quality of shot Notre Dame is taking. The number of teams that can guard both Hidalgo and Miles is pretty low, and it’s harder to see “grind Notre Dame into a half-court game” working against a team that can easily spread the floor with quality 3-point shooters who can defend pretty damn well themselves on the other end.
Getting the monkey off their back
The Irish beat all but two ACC teams last year — Syracuse and North Carolina. Job done with both of them already this year.
While the pre-Connecticut win over the Orange was very much expected after Dyaisha Fair’s graduation, the Tar Heels had kind of been Notre Dame’s Achilles’ heel in the Niele Ivey era. Ivey had beaten North Carolina just once heading into Sunday’s game, with the last two losses being in the type of ugly grind North Carolina is great at dragging teams into (60–50 in 2022/23, 61–57 last year).
Package that with how backloaded Notre Dame’s ACC schedule looked coming into the year, and Sunday’s game was one I had circled as a key contest from the jump — so it was nice to see the Irish play a relatively stress-free game in Chapel Hill. Notre Dame’s edge in this game was never really in doubt, and any time you can pick up a ranked road win by 10 in a game where you turn it over 21 times, you take it.
Do the Irish always light it up from 3 to the extent they did Sunday? Absolutely not, and a rematch with North Carolina in the ACC tournament would still concern me. But this was the expected test early in conference play, and the Irish passed with flying colors.
Next Thursday’s home date with Georgia Tech has much more impact than expected at the start of the season, with the Yellow Jackets still unbeaten and playing great basketball, but after that, the Irish probably don’t play another team in contention for the ACC title until Duke visits on Presidents’ Day. It’s the start of a four-game stretch where the Irish play all of Duke, N.C. State, and Florida State, but getting the early win over North Carolina under their belt is a great step forward to playing from a position of power in the standings when those games roll around. One January test down for this group.
Odds and ends
Wake Forest visits Thursday in a game that was moved up a couple hours to not be played at the same time as a certain football game. The Demon Deacons are 0-3 in ACC play and 7-7 on the season, featuring losses to St. John’s and Villanova to go with a pair of strong mid-majors in Fairfield and George Mason.
Sunday’s trip to Clemson is intriguing, as the Tigers have started strong in the ACC under first-year head coach Shawn Poppie after a rocky non-conference slate. Clemson is fresh off a sweep of a ranked California squad and Stanford last week, and took N.C. State to the wire in Raleigh to close 2024. If you want to pick out a trap game for the Irish, this would be it.
I don’t want to jinx it, but the Utah loss looks … a lot less bad now than it did a few weeks ago. The Utes have played some good basketball and finally broke into the top 25 this week, rattling off wins including a road victory at the leading candidate for disappointment of the year, Iowa State. Utah hosts Kansas State on Wednesday in a huge Big XII game; the Wildcats’ only loss was to Duke over Thanksgiving.
We got two new friends since the last time we talked! Freshman walk-on Luci Jensen made her debut against Eastern Michigan, while junior Bella Tehrani joined from the Irish volleyball squad and debuted against Loyola Maryland the next week. Fun to at the least see a couple extra faces in uniform on the Irish bench.
While we wait for a big day as Irish fans Thursday, I’m simply choosing to enjoy the statement “Notre Dame’s No. 3-ranked women’s basketball game got moved up because Notre Dame’s football team is playing in the national semifinal.” It’s been a fun few months here, so let’s keep it rolling.