Michael Jordan in 1995-96. Kobe Bryant in 2000-01. Stephen Curry in 2016-17.
If these three guards — undoubtedly some of the best of all time on the best teams of all time — went down with an injury in the playoffs, would they still have won a championship?
The USC Trojans women’s basketball team entered themselves into a major predicament on Monday night in their round of 32, 96-59 win over the Mississippi State Bulldogs. During a fast break, star sophomore guard JuJu Watkins was tangled up and had to be carried off the court in the middle of the first quarter due to a season-ending injury that will require surgery.
Everyone knew the contest would be physical, but the first quarter was something else. After Watkins went down to a supposed torn ACL according to ESPN’s Shams Charania, there was not a single second of Bulldog possession time that the boos didn’t rain down on the court.
While it is important to talk about all that Watkins has done for the Trojans this year, it became immediately apparent with just under five minutes left in the first quarter, that the team will need to find a way to win without the best player in women’s collegiate basketball.
So the question is: Can USC win without JuJu Watkins?
The quick answer from everybody is no.
The team has had to evolve an extreme amount overall, with only two people returning from last year’s starting five in Watkins and senior center Rayah Marshall. Other than these two, all other Trojans roster members that get notable playing time are either freshmen or transfers into the program.
“When you throw a bunch of talented people on a team, it doesn’t become a team until you work through some things,” head coach Lindsay Gottlieb said in the post-game press conference.
They certainly have had to work through many things so far this season. Starting with the loss to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish early in the season, the Trojans have also faced adversity head-on with a late loss to an unranked Iowa Hawkeyes and a loss in the Big Ten Tournament Championship to the UCLA Bruins. The loss of Watkins is just yet another massive hurdle the team must overcome.
Though it does seem like the odds have fallen drastically for the Trojans, if the right people step up at the right time, they are well in contention to win a national championship in Tampa.
The first person that needs to step up — and already has — is graduate forward Kiki Iriafen.
With a season-high 36 points on 16-for-22 from the field, Iriafen tied her career-high in field goals made and proved a statement for all the remaining teams that USC will play. Nearly every team knows that her bread and butter is from the midrange. However, she showed that she could easily get underneath the basket with Marshall and battle against some of the best bigs in the league. The combination of Iriafen and Marshall had 18 boards for the team and was a huge reason why they out-rebounded one of the top teams in that category by eight.
The next person that USC has to look to is another graduate student: Oregon State transfer Talia von Oelhoffen (TVO).
The guard has struggled to find where she fits into this highly talented roster so far this year, which is no surprise as only so many points can be scored in a game. Averaging a team-seventh-best 5.9 points per game, von Oelhoffen has grown into the role of the facilitator, averaging 3.4 assists per game, almost negligibly behind Watkins’ 3.42 in the same category for the team lead. With 29 assists last night against Mississippi State, it is apparent that USC loves to share the rock.
“I think we are very unselfish,” Iriafen said after the game. “You could really see that today. It makes it super fun when everybody is able to contribute.”
It won’t be the assists that USC is looking for from von Oelhoffen though. What Gottlieb and every fan should hope for is what we saw in the late stages of conference play and into March Madness last year when she was still a Beaver.
TVO exploded in multiple games, one of which was against future teammate Iriafen at Stanford when von Oelhoffen nearly carried Oregon State to a victory with 27 points. The other game she left a mark on was a deceivingly tough round of 32 game against the Nebraska Cornhuskers. Von Oelhoffen had 19 points and eight assists, pushing her team to a 10-point win to advance to the Sweet 16.
Similarly, USC would love to see the 2022-23 form of sophomore TVO, who averaged 17.7 points per game through the season’s first seven games. During that stretch, she only had one game below 10 points and three greater than 20, with one of those being a 32-point game. She would later have a 41-point game against Nevada in an absurd 17-for-20 shooting performance.
Everybody has wondered how exactly she fits into this USC roster, and after Watkins goes down, it has become glaringly clear that her time is now to step up for the cardinal and gold.
The final person who needs to step up is freshman guard Avery Howell. Other than Iriafen’s point total, the thing that stood out the most on the score sheet was Howell’s 18 points and six assists. It isn’t the points, though, that stood out — at this point in the season, nearly everybody knows that she can launch it from deep at an extremely efficient rate. The six assists show that she can work as someone who starts the offense for the team.
With Watkins out, somebody needs to start the offense. Although people looked to Iriafen to fall into that role last game, it should be someone like Howell or von Oelhoffen instead which spreads offensive firepower all across the court. The positive with Howell doing it is she can still play the role of a spot-up shooter as long as the ball keeps moving. There are alternatives, but Howell’s role has changed drastically in the past 24 hours and needs to keep changing ahead of their next matchup.
USC has only a few days to figure everything out, with their Sweet 16 matchup in Spokane against No. 5 seed Kansas State set to tip off on Saturday at 5 p.m.