Halfway through the Elite Eight matchup between Duke and UCLA on Sunday at Golden 1 Center, the underdog Blue Devils had the Bruins on the ropes, suffocating their usually potent offense and building an 8-point lead.
For just the second time this season, the Bruins trailed at half and went to the locker room looking for answers.
“We can’t have these slow starts,” senior center Lauren Betts said. “It speaks to the maturity of this team. We could have gone into that locker room and kept our head down and gotten mad at each other, but we showed up and played for each other.”
Out of the locker room, senior guard Gabriela Jaquez provided the initial spark.
She found her big, Betts, on the low block then jetted past her defender, executing a textbook give-and-go. After Duke responded with a layup of their own, Jaquez found daylight and drilled a three, cutting the deficit to just five.
“Everything they were doing was attacking down the middle of the key,” UCLA head coach Cori Close said. “We wanted to force them to make shots around the baseline, where I didn’t think they’d have as good a rhythm. That fueled us to be able to attack in transition.”
Close saw the momentum beginning to shift and brought graduate forward Angela Dugalić back on the floor to play opposite Betts. The Bruins started four guards around their center and brought Dugalić off the bench, allowing Close the optionality to go big at any moment.
“[Dugalić] told me that she was happy to come off the bench,” Close said. “She told me herself that she didn’t care whether she started or not.”
Duke wasn’t deterred by the new size, scoring a pair of baskets and forcing a shot-clock violation, keeping UCLA five points out of reach.
Close called timeout, sensing an opportunity to strike.
In their prior game against Minnesota, Close emphasized the importance of kills, something her Bruins can achieve by executing three consecutive defensive stops.
Duke turned the ball over out of timeout, then graduate guard Gianna Kneepkens scored.
UCLA forced a tough look wide, then graduate guard Charlisse Leger-Walker scored.
Duke turned the ball over again, and the crowd rose to their feet. The gravity of the moment was palpable as senior guard Kiki Rice led the break.
She found Kneepkens at the top of the arc, who launched a high-arcing three that found the bottom of the net, sending the arena into a frenzy.
With the lead in hand, Duke head coach Kara Lawson called timeout, hoping to settle her team down. After the break, UCLA began feeding their bigs, and Duke’s previously strong interior defense was slowly ground away.
In the final play of the third quarter, a Rice three careened off of the iron and into the hands of a crashing Dugalić. She brought the ball to the floor before exploding upwards, putting a floater through the nylon as the buzzer rang.
Using the double-big lineup of Betts and Dugalić, Duke cruised for the rest of the game, securing their place in the Final Four with a 70-58 win.
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As expected, this was a battle of the blocks. Neither team shot the three well, combining to shoot three of 27 from deep. This resulted in a physical, below-the-rim game that was ultimately decided by points in the paint.
At half, the difference in paint points was just four, which ballooned to 22 after a second half where the Bruins outscored Duke 26-8.
“Team defense is everything to us,” Close said. “We thought, if we could chase them off the 3-point line and force them into hard twos, it’d come down to getting rebounds.”
Betts and Dugalić combined for 32 of UCLA’s 54 paint points, which Duke had no answer for down the stretch. Both made the Sacramento Regional 2 All-Tournament team, with Betts being named the regional’s Most Outstanding Player.
The Bruin bigs were aided by nine points from Jaquez, as well as seven apiece from Kneepkens and Rice, the latter of who grabbed eight rebounds.
Duke’s early lead was built by taking advantage of UCLA’s turnovers, which the Bruins limited in the second half. The Blue Devils got double-digit points from four players, with senior guard Taina Mair leading their scoring with 21 points.
Mair and sophomore forward Toby Fournier joined Betts and Dugalić on the All-Tournament team.
“I knew that this team is capable of winning a national championship,” Dugalić said. “This is a business trip at the end of the day. We have a job to do and that’s to win a championship.”
With the win, UCLA advances to the Final Four in Phoenix and will take on the winner of the Michigan versus Texas game on April 3.
