A’ja Wilson is easily USC’s best player — and her stats may suffer as a result
Just about everyone in the SEC seems to agree on one fact: A’ja Wilson will be the overwhelming, dominant, near-unstoppable force for South Carolina women’s basketball this season.
There’s only one person who doesn’t see things that way – A’ja Wilson.
“(Defenders’) main focus is on me, and I really don’t understand why, because I have other teammates who can do great things,” Wilson said Thursday at SEC media day in Nashville.
While it’s true that the Gamecocks return experienced players such as Tyasha Harris, Bianca Cuevas-Moore and Doniyah Cliney, they’ve also lost a large chunk of their production from last season’s national title-winning squad – 48 percent of their scoring and 46 percent of their rebounding.
That means that Wilson, already a first-team All-American and SEC Player of the Year, will likely become an even more central figure in South Carolina’s attack. Last season, she was 61st in the nation in scoring and 147th in rebounds because that’s what she needed to do: Allisha Gray, Alaina Coates and Kaela Davis were getting lots of opportunities too.
For opposing coaches, the thought of facing a fully unleashed Wilson is troubling.
“Yeah, they lost those three first-round draft picks,” Ole Miss coach Matt Insell said Thursday. “Now that’s scary because now they may put more of an emphasis on just throwing it to A’ja. Now they don’t have to spread it. Now she’s going to get it 75 percent of the time instead of getting it 30 or 40 percent of the time because you have so many other kids.”
Insell also said his team, which faces South Carolina in January, has started practicing schemes and ways to limit Wilson. Other coaches also gave answers that indicated they’ve been thinking about how to minimize the damage Wilson can inflict.
“Like they used to say on ESPN, you can’t stop her, you can only hope to contain her,” Florida coach Cam Newbauer said. “A player of her caliber is so athletic, so long, physically gifted, and can score a multitude of ways, plus the rebounding on the defensive end, how she can affect a game. I think you just gotta limit her touches, if you can, and just try to figure out any little deficiency that you force her to try to use. ... She’s that good, to where I think she could beat you by herself.”
Because Wilson is so clearly South Carolina’s best offensive player, coach Dawn Staley now has to spend time gameplanning as if she won’t be in the game at all – because opposing defenses will likely swarm her, trying to force every offensive possession through Wilson may be not always be the best strategy.
In practice this year, “when she gets a foul quickly in a drill, we’ll send her to the sidelines,” Staley said Thursday. “Because that’s what it’s going to feel like. We really can’t afford to have her in foul trouble throughout the year, although we know teams will do anything to get her on the bench, whether it’s triple-teaming her (or) trying to force her to foul.
“But we have to put her in those scenarios because we don’t have the talent around her that we had last year where everybody you had to guard. This year’s team, we’re gong to have to prove that we can be a threat at every position, and if we don’t, she’s going to have a hard time creating space for her to be effective.”
Ask Wilson, though, and there’s no doubt in her mind that her teammates will provide the necessary offensive firepower.
“If (I’m) going to be the focus, I’m just so excited to let my teammates showcase what they can do,” she said. “So they can say, ‘Hey, the focus doesn’t always have to be on A’ja.’
“If our guards are hitting down shots in practice and things are going well, it’s not like we’re stuck in one gameplan. We have multiple ones. Once we have those down and once we have people understanding our system, it’s going to work out fine.”
At the very least, early in the season, it is entirely possible that Wilson won’t be the team’s top scorer as she attracts defenses’ attention and other players see open looks as a result. It’s a phenomenon that her teammates already have noticed.
“I know people are going to try to really harp on A’ja and try to (double-team her), so last year, I know a lot of people sagged off on me, so I know I have to shoot better ... I am very excited. Like I said, a lot of people sagged off me last year, and I’m ready to capitalize on that now,” Harris said Thursday.
As the season progresses, the Gamecocks hope players like Harris score often and efficiently enough to force opposing teams to adjust and spread their defenses more equally – freeing Wilson up as a result.
And when that happens, there’s only so much you can do, according to LSU coach Nikki Fargas.
“The only thing you can do with A’ja is you can try to limit her touches ... and when she does touch, just really try to stay in front of her and the basket,” Fargas said Thursday. “She scores in so many different ways, it’s not just her catching and scoring it, it may be her on the offensive glass, it may be her running hard in transition. So the best chance of playing someone like A’ja Wilson is you got to go far and beyond her level of intensity.”
This story was originally published October 21, 2017 at 5:38 PM with the headline "A’ja Wilson is easily USC’s best player — and her stats may suffer as a result."