LSU’s Kim Mulkey brims with confidence. Her point guards allow her to feel that way.
Kim Mulkey went back to drawing board to address point guard position after last year’s NCAA Tournament run ended in Elite Eight.
After rout of Florida State, No. 3 LSU remains longshot by oddsmakers to win national championship.
Kim Mulkey raised her fists, threw back her head, and cackled like a cartoon villain. Her LSU Tigers were cooking Florida State in the NCAA Tournament.
With a blur of buckets, LSU turned a close halftime score into a rout. Mulkey lived it up on the sideline, relishing the scoring barrage.
And the coach who owns four national titles smiled afterward, not just because of LSU’s slick shooting in a 101-71 second-round romp, but because of her point guards’ maestro-like orchestration of the assault that advanced LSU into the Sweet 16 for a third straight season.
Mulkey loved how Shayeann Day-Wilson and Last-Tear Poa distributed the ball and valued possession, while combining for 13 assists and just four turnovers throughout two rounds. Freshman guard Jada Richard played some valuable minutes, too.
Never mind that Day-Wilson and Poa totaled only two points against FSU. Mulkey doesn’t need her point guards to score. She’s got other players for that. Get the ball in their hands.
“You cannot win in any sport without a quarterback,” Mulkey said on ESPN, clapping with each word to emphasize her point, “and I thought ‘Shy’ was outstanding. I thought Poa and ‘Shy’ were outstanding this whole time this weekend. All they gotta do is run the show. I’m not going to ask them to do too much. You’ve got to lead around you, and just run the show.”
Against FSU, Mulkey got what she craves from the pivotal position she herself played as an All-America spitfire at Louisiana Tech.
With more point guard play like this, No. 3 LSU could keep humming into the Final Four – and who knows what comes after that? Few teams could have kept up with LSU on Monday.
Now, on to No. 2 North Carolina State on Friday.
“We don’t play to get to a Sweet 16 at LSU women’s basketball anymore,” Mulkey said.
LSU’s point guards will determine March Madness fate
Point guard performance became the biggest difference between LSU’s 2023 national championship and last season’s journey that ended in the Elite Eight.
The headlines gravitated to Angel Reese two years ago after LSU upset Iowa in the championship, but point guard Alexis Morris’ nine assists in her final college game fueled LSU’s stampede on the Hawkeyes and capped her splendid tournament.
To replace Morris, Mulkey tried to cram a shooting guard-sized peg into a point guard-shaped hole when she tapped ballyhooed Louisville transfer Hailey Van Lith with the assignment.
Van Lith arrived as a volume shooter who’d averaged more turnovers than assists in her final season at Louisville. She joined an LSU team filled with big personalities and pre-existing alpha scorers. Van Lith struggled to find her groove. She never really fit what Mulkey wanted out of the position.
Chalk it up as a rare roster miscalculation by the Hall of Fame coach.
Van Lith made 6 of 30 field goal attempts during last year’s NCAA Tournament. For Van Lith, all’s well that ends well. She transferred to TCU, and she’s rebounded with a career-best season, leading the Horned Frogs to the Sweet 16 in a region opposite from LSU.
Mulkey took another crack at solving LSU’s point guard needs with Day-Wilson, a Miami transfer. This time, she secured a player who specializes in involving others and limiting mistakes. Day-Wilson has more than 400 career assists, and although she’s shooting less than 30% from the field for the season, LSU outscored FSU by 41 points while Day-Wilson was on the court. There’s no higher compliment for a point guard than that.
Can Kim Mulkey’s LSU Tigers recapture 3-seed magic?
Mulkey magnetizes the spotlight. She dresses audaciously, complete with vibrant colors, distinct designs or feathers. She’s a fully loaded pistol of personality. Throughout Mulkey’s years coaching LSU, she and her cast of stars captured and held our attention.
Mulkey and her Tigers flying under the radar sounds contradictory on its surface, and yet, here they are, still a 35-to-1 longshot to win the national championship. Those odds sound like an investment opportunity.
Never mind LSU’s No. 3 seeding. The Tigers won two years ago as a 3-seed, and they smashed their next opponent, N.C. State, in November.
True, a No. 1 or No. 2 seed has won the women’s tournament 90% of the time since it expanded to 64 teams in 1994, but LSU isn’t a typical No. 3 seed. Three LSU starters contributed on the 2023 national championship team. Elite scorers populate this roster, and all cylinders were all firing against FSU. The point guards ran the show, while the wings and the posts knocked down shots.
‘We weren’t talked about at all when we won it two years ago,” Mulkey said. “So, let’s go see what we can do.”
That’s the sound of a coach brimming with confidence, buoyed by how her point guards are playing.
Blake Toppmeyer is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer. Subscribe to read all of his columns.