LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – They can’t all be works of art. For the University of Louisville women’s basketball team, Sunday's game against Pittsburgh was a bit of a puzzle. A Pitt zone and cold Cardinal shooting didn’t mix well. The Panthers attacked the paint and grabbed a double-digit lead in the first half.
Louisville may not be nationally ranked and isn’t the dominant force it has been over much of the past decade. It even trailed Sunday for nearly 25 minutes of game time.
But the Cardinals know what to do when winning plays are required, and down the stretch made enough big ones to gut out a 76-69 victory before 9,218 fans in the KFC Yum! Center.
Louisville scored the game’s final eight points and 13 of the last 14 to improve to 13-5 overall and 4-1 in the ACC.
In a league with three teams in the Top 10 and five in the Top 25, Walz said he expects every night to be a fight, even a game against a Pitt team that Louisville beat by 24 in Pittsburgh before Christmas.
“This league, I try to tell people,” Walz said. “People say, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ Nothing’s wrong. Everybody’s good. And they have been good.”
Fortunately for Walz, his team was pretty good in the second half on Saturday. Trailing by six at the break after falling behind by as many as 12 in the second quarter, the Cardinals cranked up their defensive pressure in the second half, generated a few baskets off turnovers, and started to execute better offensively.
Norika Konno rises up for 3 of her 11 points in Louisville's victory over Pitt on Jan. 8, 2023.
Norika Konno was big off the bench, contributing 11 points, 3 assists and 3 steals. Olivia Cochran had 8 points and 9 rebounds. And Mykasa Robinson had a key stretch late when Louisville took control, taking a charge, getting a steal and an and-one layup, and causing another steal with a deflection.
Hailey Van Lith led the Cardinals with 18 points and 7 assists. CC Carr added 16 points and 4 assists.
“I think we found are the right group,” Van Lith said. “We were a little bit the whole game to find what group was going to play well together and I think we found that group in those minutes (in the second half) and we just took advantage of it. . . . You know, playing in the ACC -- I think today there were two upsets maybe already. Last Thursday, there were upsets. So in the ACC there’s no team that’s and obvious easy 30-point win, where you say, let the starters relax. That's not what this conference is. So, being able to win a game like this where technically we are the favored team and the underdog comes out and makes a run at us, for us to just stay within ourselves and keep playing our game, I think that's something that I'll be very valuable in this league because every game is going to be competitive.”
The win came on a day when U of L honored its 2012-13 team that went to the NCAA championship game in New Orleans before losing to UConn. That team scored one of the biggest upsets in women’s college basketball history when it knocked off Britney Griner and unbeaten Baylor on its way to the Final Four. They called themselves “the party crashers.”
“They were just a group of kids that just came in here and believed and had a passion,” Walz said. “They worked and played together. They played with joy, and that's what I keep telling our players is if you don't play with joy, man, it's a tough, tough game to play.”
Next up for Louisville is a trip to No. 9-ranked Virginia Tech on Thursday at 7 p.m.
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