Before his team’s second-round matchup against the Blue Devils, Louisiana State head coach Van Chancellor knew that his star player, Allison Hightower, would need to have a career night for his squad to beat Duke.
“If Allison Hightower only has 10 points tomorrow night, I’ll be playing golf by Wednesday afternoon,” Chancellor said Sunday. “That’s if my back is okay.”
Although the questions about his back remain unanswered, Chancellor may have found comfort in Hightower’s dominant performance early in the game. Barely eight minutes in, Hightower had already put up a 5-of-5 performance to score 11 points.
It was at that point when Duke head coach Joanne P. McCallie knew something was going dreadfully wrong. Her squad was already down 15-8 to the Tigers, and the Blue Devils had failed to capitalize on their last three shots.
Duke’s man-to-man defense complemented the Tigers’ offensive playbook almost perfectly, allowing the visitors to drive the ball into the paint often and successfully. Hightower was having her way against Duke junior forward Karima Christmas, dribbling the ball into the lane and putting up unconventional yet oddly successful layups in an almost Greivis Vasquez-like fashion.
“We were a little bit behind the ball, chasing,” McCallie said of her team’s early struggles. “This was elevating their quickness, which was getting [Hightower] excited. She rubbed our players off some screens pretty well.”
Then, Duke made the change that won the game. The Blue Devils switched to a zone defense, rotating between a 1-2-2, 2-3 and 3-2 to fully utilize the potential of Duke’s size advantage. The Blue Devils had four players more than six feet tall in their starting lineup, whereas Louisiana State only had two.
And suddenly, Hightower was not such a nightmare for Duke’s defense anymore.
“When we made the switch [to zone], [Hightower] had two-and-a-half players around her,” McCallie explained. “So we tried to clog the passing angles around her.”
It showed. After her incredible start, Hightower was held to 1-of-11 shooting for the rest of regulation.
And, in a manner mirroring their struggling leader, the rest of the Tigers began to falter as well. Duke’s stifling defense, more specifically its full-court pressure, forced Louisiana State to give the ball away 22 times. On more than one occasion, the Tigers would register back-to-back-to-back turnovers.
“We had to stop turning the ball over that much,” Chancellor said. “We are not a turnover-prone basketball team. Some of [our struggles] tonight were self-inflicted, and some of our troubles due to Duke.... [McCallie] did a nice job changing this team to a multiple-defense team.”
Even when Louisiana State managed to survive the Blue Devils’ press, the Tigers could not convert on open looks when they got them late in the game. In the second half, Louisiana State shot 33.3 percent, compared to a blistering 52.4 percent clip in the first 20 minutes.
“I am really proud of our team, especially the second-half defense with the field-goal percentage that was forced, the way our team stayed together as a unit and the way our team communicated,” McCallie said.
And in a game in which the Blue Devils’ offense was less than impressive, the team needed a dominant defensive performance to book its ticket to Memphis for the Sweet 16.
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