LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – The University of Louisville women’s basketball team was hoping to end its regular-season with a bang as it paid a visit to No. 3-ranked Notre Dame in a nationally televised matchup on Sunday.
Instead, it finished with a clang. The Cardinals, quite simply, could not make shots. They made a decent percentage from three-point range, led by senior guard Jayda Curry’s 19 points. But they could not convert around the rim or on shorter jumpers, and fell to the Fighting Irish 72-59 before a sellout crowd of 8,852 in Purcell Pavillion.
The loss knocked Louisville out of a double-bye in this week’s ACC Tournament. They will enter the tournament as the No. 5 seed and play Thursday morning at 11 a.m. against the winner of the 12-13 matchup the day prior.
The Cardinals finish the season 20-9, 13-5 in the ACC, after beginning the season 6-5. Head coach Jeff Walz, who was frustrated with officiating all game long, particularly with contact to his players shooting around the basket, at one point said on his postgame radio show, “We just need to fall better.”
But in the end, he said his team’s lapses in offensive execution in the second and third quarters ended up being its downfall.
“We knew we were going to have to score the basketball,” Walz said. “It's a team you have to be able to score against. We missed some layups. We missed some close ones. And those are just shots you can't miss in games like this. . . . We just did not do a very good job of converting around the basket when we really needed to. We had good looks, had real good looks, had some layups and just didn't convert them. . . . In the end, they played better.”
Louisville coach Jeff Walz shouts to his team during a win over Clemson.
Louisville went 8-of-23 from three-point range. It went 14-50 from two-point range and made 7-of-14 layups. In all, the Cardinals missed 51 shots in the game and shot 30 percent from the field, 13 points lower than their season percentage.
Notre Dame was led by Hannah Hidalgo with 20 points and Olivia Miles with 15. Curry was the only Louisville player in double figures.
Louisville led after one quarter, but was outscored 22-13 in the second. Curry it back-to-back threes early in the third to pull Louisville within three, but the Cardinals would only score six more points the rest of the quarter, and Notre Dame ran its lead to 18 on three-pointer by Miles at the buzzer.
Walz played his bench for much of the fourth quarter, while Notre Dame kept its starting rotation intact. Back-to-back threes by Miles and Hidalgo put the Irish up 20 with 1:15 left, then Louisville scored the final seven points of the game.
“We started off well (in the third quarter) with Jayda hitting back-to-back threes,” Walz said. “We did a really nice job of finding her and looking for her and then, you know, we scored those quick six, and then don't score but another six the entire quarter. . . . Some things we’ve got to get better at. Jayda hits a three in the first half and then we come down and are going to run a set to get her another look. And we have no idea why we’re running it. It’s horns three cut, we call it, which we throw it to her coming off a screen cutting to the corner, and we throw it to the post rolling. And I’m thinking, ‘What are you doing? Don’t you know Jayda just hit a three?’ So I’m just challenging them on those basketball IQ things. We had Miles guarding Mac (Mackenly Randolph), and I’m like, ‘Guys just post her. She can’t guard her in there.’ And we wouldn’t even throw it to her. We just drove it. This was the matchup to our advantage. I thought we competed. Just didn’t it well enough to win. We had opportunities to get what we wanted. The ball just didn’t go in at times.”
Walz said his defense wasn’t perfect, but was good enough to give his team a chance, had it shot even a normal percentage.
Regardless, Louisville heads to the postseason with anticipation. Tajianna Roberts, despite a rough shooting game at Notre Dame, has been one of the best freshmen in the ACC. Curry is playing with more confidence than at any point in her college career.
“I’m excited,” Walz said. “I think we’re playing some pretty good basketball. I proud of how far we’ve come. . . . One of the things that we'll try to do is we get that break between the ACC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament, and we will try and make sure that we give the kids some time off. You need them rested. And then we'll try to do a little few team activities and get them to, you know, have some fun. It's still a game, and if you're not having fun then it's hard to get the best out of it. But at the same time, there's expectations that we’ve built here at Louisville. We have to understand what's at stake and what we have to do. The thing about it is, we're not sneaking up on anybody in the postseason.”
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