Notre Dame, Baylor seek big finish
DENVER — The teams that have run the gantlet to reach today’s NCAA women’s basketball championship game shared a mantra all season: They were on a mission to complete unfinished business.
Notre Dame advanced to last year’s final before falling short in the second half to Texas A&M. Baylor’s disappointment came in the Elite Eight when, as a No. 1 seed, it lost to an A&M team it had beaten three times.
“It’s been inspirational and motivational for us all year,” Notre Dame coach Muffet Mcgraw said of the memory of last April. “But we come into this game, and somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose.”
Before every home game, Baylor ran a video on the scoreboard of coach Kim Mulkey exhorting the Lady Bears in a locker room speech, invoking the bitter memory of last season. The players wear bracelets reminding them of the end to last season.
Last summer, Notre Dame guard Skylar Diggins wrote “Unfinished business. 76-70, 15:52” on a board in the Fighting Irish locker room. The message referenced the final score in last year’s final and the time remaining when Notre Dame led by seven.
“It would make a really great story, how we came full circle,” Diggins said.
But the Irish (35-3) will be decided underdogs. Baylor is 39-0. The Lady Bears have 6-8 junior center Brittney Griner, the national player of the year with a 7-4 wingspan who delivers a combination of offense and defense the women’s game has never seen.
“Until you see her close up in a game, you really can’t even appreciate how big she is,” Mcgraw said.
The Irish got up close with Griner and the Lady Bears in the fourth game of the season, a 94-81 Baylor win in Waco, Texas. Mulkey thinks the rematch will have a different tenor.
“I’d say neither team played very good defense,” she said. “I don’t know that I would anticipate it being a highscoring game. I think you’ll see two teams that will buckle down and guard each other.”
Griner played all 40 minutes in the first meeting and had 32 points, 14 rebounds and five blocked shots.
But the key matchup tonight could be Diggins and Odyssey Sims. In the first game, Sims had 25 points, six steals and six assists. Diggins had 27 points but seven turnovers.
“I think she’s the key to the game,” Diggins said of her counterpart. “We’ll throw different things at Brittney, but Odyssey is what makes them go.”
Sims says her approach to guarding Diggins is one of containment.
“I just try to pressure the ball as much as I can and create turnovers,” Sims said. “But her being the player that she is, she’s going to get hers at the end of the day. She makes everyone around her better.”
Mulkey took Baylor to the 2005 title. The closest the Lady Bears have been since was a semifinal loss to Connecticut in 2010. “It boils down to those players have to have a hunger about them and a sense about that feeling I had last year,” she says. “I don’t want to have it again.”