In Duke’s 76-87 loss to Notre Dame, the Blue Devils saw their championship dreams dashed. While it is hard to credit just one player for a team’s victory, the majority would agree that the Most Outstanding Player of the Norfolk Regional was the reason the top-seeded Fighting Irish were able to advance to the Final Four for the third time in four years.
The Most Outstanding Player of the Norfolk Region and NCAA Tournament thus far has been Notre Dame senior point guard Skylar Diggins. The senior was paired up against freshman point guard Alexis Jones Tuesday night, one game after Jones got the best of Nebraska senior point guard Lindsey Moore. Diggins proved to the arena why she is a First-Team All-American and would not let Jones and the Blue Devils put an end to her career.
“Skyler is just a great player,” Duke head coach Joanne P. McCallie said. “She does a super job. She scored for them. [She had] nine assists that I think were key…. Her game has just really continued to grow through her career, and they’re a strong team.”
Once Duke lost Jones to foul trouble, the game turned into the kind of offensive scoring battle that Duke would normally win. But Notre Dame is one of the few teams that can keep up with the Blue Devils’ pace and overtook Duke in the second half, going on a 17-5 run.
Junior guard Chloe Wells was assigned to Diggins, but could not frustrate her in the way that Jones had in the opening half. This allowed the Fighting Irish to penetrate the lane early and often in the second half and to score with relative ease, whether it be on a layup or a kick-out 3-pointer from junior Kayla McBride, who knocked down 3-of-5 from behind the arc.
“Once Lex went out we stopped focusing on defensive stops and it turned into a game of trading buckets,” sophomore center Elizabeth Williams said. “And that’s not the type of game that we wanted to be in.... We lost a little bit of focus.”
With a player like Diggins on the floor, it was easy to overlook other performances, such as the one junior guard Tricia Liston put forth. Liston poured in 19 points on only nine shots and went 6-for-7 from the free-throw line.
Diggins had only five more points than Liston and took seven more shots, including eight attempted 3-pointers compared to Liston’s two. Notre Dame recognized Liston’s affinity for the three-point shots, so the Fighting Irish closed out hard whenever she had the ball behind-the-arc. In previous games, Liston would pass the ball off or dribble to create an open passing lane for a point guard, but not Tuesday night.
Liston made the paint hers in the opening half, making use of her dribble to penetrate the Fighting Irish’s defense and take advantage of a number of Notre Dame’s smaller guards. On one possession, she called for an isolation on the right side, backed down her defender and hit a turnaround bank-shot.
“They were definitely playing me to my shot, so the lane was open, the ball-fake and drive was open,” Liston said. “I was just trying to do anything I could get open with and find my shot. It happened to be attacking the basket today.”
The theme of the Blue Devils only playing one superb half then letting up in the other half has defined their season, but only came back to bite them when they played elite teams. In its loss to Connecticut, Duke only trailed by one point at halftime before going on to lose 49-79. In Tuesday night’s contest, the Blue Devils led 37-31 at halftime before succumbing to the high-powered offense of Notre Dame and losing by 11.
“Our first half was pretty good, we held them to 20-something points, and we were right on pace for the goal that we wanted to keep them at for the game,” Liston said. “And so I thought we did a great job and we had great focus on the shooters and the go-tos that we wanted to shut down. [I] wish we could have had that same focus in the second half on defense.”
Another repeat has plagued the Blue Devils—Duke has made the Elite Eight four years in a row and lost every time. Although they were missing second-team All-American junior point guard Chelsea Gray, the Blue Devils still boast a roster full of McDonald’s All-Americans and All-ACC players. The talent is there, as the first half showed, but the execution was not.
“It’s really hard [to get this close],” Williams said. “We felt like we deserved to be here but we didn’t play a full game that reflected that, and unfortunately, we see our result now.”
Notre Dame racked up 56 points in the second half alone, more than Duke scored in its previous game against Nebraska. But the end of the game saw the Blue Devils—who cut a 16-point lead down to nine with under a minute to go—fight back. By that time it was too late, and the clock ran out as Duke failed to hit one last shot to bring the deficit back to single digits.
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