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A rival rematch anticipated to be close and competitive turned out to be anything but Saturday, as No. 4 USC ran past No. 2 UCLA, 80-67, to claim the Big Ten regular-season title and sweep the series between the rivals.
JuJu Watkins lead the Trojans with 30 points, 5 assists, 3 blocks, 3 rebounds and 2 steals in giving the Bruins the second loss on the year – also at their hands. Kiki Iriafen added 17 points and 9 rebounds.
“We’ve become a team,” coach Lindsay Gottlieb said on court after the win.
It is no small feat for the Women of Troy their their coach, who assembled a brand-new team last season, and guided them to the Pac-12 Tournament championship. This year, with 9 new players, Gottlieb did it again, persevering through an early loss to Notre Dame and a mid-season scoring slump by Watkins.
Now in a new conference, 26-2 USC is on top again.
“We’re really proud to be Big 10 regular-season champs,” Gottlieb said. “The way we won shows the growth of our team. It literally took every single person….it was such a team effort. We were locked in all week. Our mentality was the differentiator.”
Nine of 12 Trojan players who took the floor scored in the wire-to-wire win, where they shot 48.5 percent and 34.8 percent from three, while forcing 16 Bruin turnovers and limiting their opponents to 36 percent shooting from the field and 25 percent from behind the arc.
Last year Iriafen played for Stanford, who won the regular-season title, and Watkins was a freshman at USC. The rest of the roster is a mixture of returners, true freshmen and transfers.
“We have an entire team in there who are champions, and that bonds you more than anything,” Gottlieb said. “To have this celebration after the way we played together is very gratifying. You cherish those moments.”
A sold-out Pauley Pavilion crowd came ready to cheer UCLA to victory, but it was USC who struck first, running out to a 21-12 lead with less than 3 minutes to go in the first. A Bruin run, capped by an Angela Dugalic 3-pointer, cut the Trojan lead to 23-20 at the end of the frame.
The visitors ran up their lead to double-digits again in the second quarter, and lead by 14 at the break. In the third quarter UCLA cut the lead to 4 at the 3:02 mark, but USC went on another run to pad their advantage to 13 with 10 minutes left.
The fourth quarter was all Trojans, who upped their advantage to as much as 19 points on at two different points in the frame.
Kiki Rice lead the Bruins with 16 points, 6 assists and 4 rebounds, while Londynn Jones scored 12 points, and Gabriela Jaquez had 7 points, 6 rebounds and 4 assists. Center Lauren Betts had 11 points and 11 rebounds, and was plagued by turnovers, committing 5.
Coach Cori Close brought Rice and Jaquez to the post-game press conference, saying they were the two who were trying to get them to work as one.
“The bottom line is we didn’t come out ready; we weren’t locked in as a whole team,” she said. “These two did everything they could to get them together.”
“I’m just really pissed off we didn’t show up and do our jobs. Our team was prepared, we knew what do to, and we didn’t do it. So we’ve got to figure out why……we need more people to be counted on to do their jobs.”
Rice likened the loss to the team’s fall to LSU in last year’s NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 round.
“We turned the ball over; we didn’t execute the scout,” she said. “Those were mental errors – self-inflicted wounds. We didn’t make good decisions.”
Both USC and UCLA get double-byes in the Big Ten Tournament, and won’t play until Friday.
Full game photo gallery
