UCLA will Win the NCAA Women's Tournament - Reasons Why By Keith Spillett

Latest Reasons

• Lauren Betts is stronger than bathtub gin and the best UCLA post scorer who never received a dime from Sam Gilbert.  She’s not just a great offensive player because of what she does when she has the ball, she’s incredible because she is so powerful that she overwhelms anyone guarding her and catches the ball about a foot away from the basket when they run anything to the post.

  
  

• If Bill Rafferty had called the game he might have said that Gabriela Jaquez has “onions”.  While this euphamism seems both an anatomically absurd and generally obscene way of describing what others simply refer to as “guts”, going 4 for 5 from three and 4 for 4 from the line and ending up with 18 points in an Elite Eight game certainly matches whatever metaphor for clutch play you might choose to use.

  
  

• During his landmark and much maligned dissent in Sierra Club vs. Morton in 1972, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asserted that both “trees do not have standing” and “defense wins championships”.  While some legal scholars have scoffed at Douglas’ valiant attempt to take up for the rights of living but non-human entities through the courts in the first quote, all they need to do is look at the nearly five minute stretch of the 2nd quarter when UCLA didn’t give up a basket against the high-powered LSU offense to see that the second statement is demonstrably true.

  
  

• Elvis has left the building.  Kim Mulkey, who seems to regularly pull her coaching attire from The King’s Las Vegas Residency and is only matched by John Calipari’s Arkansas Collection in terms of sheer gaudiness, showed last year that she had a brilliant game plan to score against UCLA’s shutdown defense, knocking them out of the Sweet 16.  Not this year.

  
  

• Cory Close continued to show why she is considered by many the best young coach in college basketball.  She made a series of brilliant calls during the game, my favorite being when LSU was in an aggressive foul or steal defense trailing by six with 28 seconds left… Angela Dugalic was the inbounder but she dropped Jacquez behind the inbound line and passed the ball using the out of bounds line to shield the ball from the defender then threw it back to Dugalic who was then in  inbounds in order to avoid a rip and send the 80.5 % free throw shooting Senior to the line for clutch free throws. (Yes…that is legal!)

New Reasons

• They are off to a great start.  They blew the Joggin’ Jaguars of Southern University away by 40 in the opener.  Richmond hung around for a while largely on the strength of scoring machine Maggie Doogan standing on her head and making impossible shots, but eventually, the Bruins ran away with it. They expected to win the first two games convincingly.  Mission accomplished.

  
  

• As great as you think Lauren Betts is, she’s better.  They only needed her out there for 26 minutes in the opener and she popped for 14 points on 6 for 9 shooting, 6 rebounds, 4 assists, 3 blocks and a steal.  Richmond was a higher level team and she correspondingly took her game to a higher level.  From a statistical vantage point, it’s hard not to argue this was one of the most impressive performances in the history of the tournament.   In 32 minutes, she scored 30 points on (14-17 shooting), 14 rebounds (9 of them offensive), 4 assists, 2 blocks and a steal.  I did something like that once, but unfortunately, the plug came out of my Xbox and it didn’t save, so I can’t prove it. As great as those numbers sound, watching her completely control the game on both ends of the floor was truly a thing to behold.

  
  

• In her poignant novel “My Antonia”, Willa Cather once wrote “defense wins championships”.  Richmond was tied with UCLA at 36 at the half.  Then, UCLA simply decided that they weren’t going to allow the opponent to score anymore.  Richmond’s high powered offense was held to 7 points in the quarter. Richmond scored 5 points in the first two minutes in the 3rd before UCLA stomped on the Spiders, holding them to one basket in the final 8 minutes of the quarter.  It was about as stifling a stretch of defense as you will ever see in the NCAA Tournament and the sort of thing that only a championship caliber team is capable of.

  
  

• They are scoring efficiently from three point range.  Consistently making three pointers is going to be a crucial part of UCLA’s game plan as they get deeper into the tournament.  If they don’t make threes, defenses will collapse in on the paint and make it harder to get the ball to Betts and their armada of bigs.  They were 11 for 29 (40.7 %) from three in the Richmond game which stretched the defense and allowed the Bruins to get everything they wanted down low. 

• They didn’t panic.  A key sequence in the game came early in the second quarter when Doogan made a layup to give Richmond a 4-point lead.  Maybe they were going to hang around and upset the heavily favored Bruins.  UCLA immediately brought the ball down the floor and ran a beautifully designed play where Betts got the ball in the paint, drew the defense and kicked it out to Kiki Rice for a corner three.  Richmond found a way to tie it at the half, but UCLA calmly responded with a 29-7 run.  The message was clear.  You aren’t Cinderella, and even if you were, it’s long past midnight.

  
  

• There is a ton of firepower around Rice and Betts.  In the Southern game, six players scored in double figures.  Against Richmond, Timea Gardiner nailed 3 clutch three-pointers and Londyn Jones hit two more.  It’s hard enough to contain two of the best offensive players in the nation in Rice and Betts, but if UCLA is getting clutch baskets from other players, I don’t know how another team can stop them.

Original Reasons

• They are the best team in the country.  It’s a little known fact, but the team ranked #1 at the end of the season often achieves that ranking by being better than everyone else.  Since they spent 13 weeks at the #1 spot, it’s pretty safe to say that they are really great at this whole basketball thing.

  
  

• They beat everybody.  Their only losses this year were to USC and they avenged those by overwhelming the Trojans in the Big Ten Final. South Carolina is the #2 team in the country and they ran them out of Pauley Pavilion by 15 back in November. 

  
  

• I think it was William Makepeace Thackery who once said “Defense wins championships.”  Lauren Betts is Greg Oden with nicer hair.  They are overwhelmingly physical, stunningly quick and only gave up more than 70 or more points 4 times this year.  Ohio State was averaging about 79 points per game. UCLA held them to 46 last week.

  
  

• Coincidentally, offense also wins championships.  First and foremost, they grind out bucket after bucket in the paint, with Betts dropstepping and steamrolling defenders to the tune of 19.2 points per game. But Kiki Rice is the driving force on offense, constantly finding unique ways of getting to the basket and distributing to a seemingly endless array of scorers.  UCLA also averaged about 79 points per game. Nobody is holding them to 46.  Ever.

  
  

• Coach Cori Close has created a culture of toughness and tenacity that rivals any program in the country.  Remember when the knock on West Coast basketball was that teams out there were soft?  UCLA rolled into the rough and tumble Big Ten and yanked out more teeth than Jack Lambert’s dentist.  Soft?  This team is harder than me trying to park a Cybertruck. 

  
  

Keith Spillett