Everything Dawn Staley said after South Carolina’s Final Four win
South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley spoke with the media Friday after the Gamecocks took a 72-59 win over Louisville during the Final Four at Target Center. With the win, the group moves on to Sunday’s national championship game to face either UConn or Stanford.
Here’s what Staley said after the game.
Opening statement: First, I just want to say that Louisville did an extremely great job of just competing. We could never put them away because of their fight and their competitiveness and their ability to hang in there and defend and score and turn us over. They created a great environment for all of women’s basketball fans to be excited about.
On going to Saniya Rivers early: I thought Saniya did extremely well. I knew we were going to need someone that has good court vision, that’s able to pass the ball. Like she has a real good knack for her court vision. It’s elite. I just thought bringing her in where we put her in a position where she could play make, get our post players the ball or make good decisions, she’s been doing that all season long. It’s just certain situations calls for you to really hone in on that, and I thought she did a great job with it.
On learning from previous fourth-quarter performances: I think we’ve had instances late in the season where we didn’t take care of business in the fourth quarter, so I know it’s in the back of our players’ minds. It was in the back of my mind, and we were up I think nine going into the fourth quarter, and I’m just like, okay, here we go.
I think just with anything, life, life in general, it’s going to throw tests at you. You’re going to have to pass the tests or you’re going to have to retake them. I thought we’ve been put in positions where we didn’t pass the test against Kentucky and they made us pay for it, and we had other instances during the tournament where we faced it and we took it up to another level.
We took forward to other tests to take. Hopefully we’ll have to pass that one in the next game.
On the team’s defensive success: We’re a team that we really don’t turn you over. We just stay connected. We’re linked up. They do a great job of communicating. We just like to be disruptive, take the first option away, the second option away and then have you played with a short shot clock. And then that is — not a whole lot of teams are super efficient in low shot clock situations, so we try to put them in that, and then we rebound the basketball.
On the Gamecocks’ start to the game: I mean, I think our experience — I think this is Louisville’s first time being in the Final Four. Sometimes when the lights come on, it just takes you a little bit longer to just kind of get your equilibrium, and once they did, they ended up coming roaring back. But I was happy that we saw some shots go in, and I was happy that we were able to take their hit and just keep playing.
I could have called a timeout, and I think in the second quarter they went on a 12-0 run. But when you know why it’s happening and you’ve got an experienced team like we have, we just let the game settle in and corrected it on the fly.
On getting the ball inside to Aliyah Boston: Yes, that’s the stretch that they came roaring back. I mean, we have to play through her. It doesn’t mean that she has to shoot the ball, but every time she touches the ball she draws a crowd. If we’re able to kick it out -- that’s probably a time that we need to take those shots, but I thought we just got in the rhythm of shooting outside shots that really didn’t make any sense, and it just threw off our transitional defensive balance. But we corrected it, and when we started going into her, playing inside out, more shots from the outside started falling.
On Brea Beal: I mean, Brea is an elite defender. She’s so underestimated. I mean, she’s so just unassuming. It’s almost like a personality. Her personality makes it easy for people to overlook her, except the people that know what she does every single day. Elite defender. She’s just locked in. She knows what your best move is. She knows what your counter is, and she just waits. She forces you into those situations, and you’ve got to go to your third option as an individual player, and by then if you have to go through your first, second, and third, your teammates are standing around, so we’ve got you. So she really understands that part of it.
She’s calm. She’s seeing it a lot differently than she has in the past. Sometimes when you get pigeonholed into being a defender, you just take on that role and then you don’t even look to score. You don’t even look to do anything else.
But we got her comfortable. We got her — like she helps so much when she scores and when she shoots the ball, and hopefully she’ll continue to do that for us.
On having an edge having played Stanford and UConn: Is there an edge? No. There’s not an edge. When you’re playing for a National Championship, it is the team that can get to their habits quickly and stay there.
We’re very fortunate that we did play both of them, Connecticut a long, long, long time ago, but they’re probably back to where they were when we played them. That’s their norm.
Stanford has just gotten better and better and better and better and better, and there’s really no letdown. Whoever it is, you’ve got to go through a quality team to win a National Championship.
On the team’s offensive efficiency: I thought our players just really played with a lot of poise when we weren’t turning the ball over. I thought we were just ready for — we were probably ready for a little bit more jump. They just went to a regular 2-3. I just thought we saw it, we knew what we were going to do, we talked about it in shootaround today, and our players were just there to execute.
Super proud that we did have a shootaround, that the game was later that we could have a shootaround where we could discuss some things about some junk defenses and what we wanted to do, and a lot of what we wanted to do was the same plan we ran no matter what junk defense we could have seen.
It’s really surprising. We don’t have a whole lot of assists all the time, so I’m really proud of our team for being able to share the ball.
This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 9:53 PM.
