Niele Ivey did not expect the Notre Dame Fighting Irish to skid through late February and early March. She certainly did not enjoy the experience. But she is grateful that it happened when it did.
“It kind of put a mirror to the things we needed to fix,” the Notre Dame coach said earlier this weekend. “I think sometimes winning covers things up.”
That mirror revealed a group that needed to work on its spacing and figure out how to play through its defense again. Which is exactly what the Fighting Irish have done so far in the NCAA tournament. On Sunday, No. 3 seed Notre Dame trounced the No. 6 Michigan Wolverines to return to the Sweet 16, offering as complete a win as the program has seen in weeks. It also offered a blueprint for the kind of performance it would have to keep putting on to make an even deeper tournament run.
“We’re a bunch of fighters,” Irish senior guard Sonia Citron said after the 76–55 win. “We respond when we’re challenged. Coach Ivey challenged us, and we responded. We got better.”
The Fighting Irish were ranked as the best team in the country as recently as late February. But they lost two of their last three games in the regular season before stumbling to an early exit in the ACC tournament. What had seemed like a sure No. 1 seed for March Madness became a shaky No. 2 and ended up as a rather surprising No. 3. Ivey gave the players a few days to break and visit family after the conference tourney loss. They returned with more than a week of practice to relocate their identity before the NCAA tournament.
What they found was summed up thusly by star guard Hannah Hidalgo:
“When we’re all playing together as a team, how well we dominate and how well we take teams’ hearts.”
If that last bit sounds like a bit much, well, Notre Dame had ended the regular season as a team in need of a bit much. And it was hard to argue with Hidalgo after watching her team Sunday. There was no better descriptor for what Notre Dame did to Michigan. That heart was ripped out in the first quarter and given virtually no chance to beat for the rest of the afternoon: Notre Dame was up 32–12 after just the first 10 minutes. The Wolverines’ roster is built on guards, a relatively undersized but potent, high-scoring lineup. They average 78 points a game and like to shoot with abandon from beyond the arc. Yet they saw all of that closed off by Notre Dame.
“It's a tremendous confidence booster for us because we did it defensively,” Ivey said. “It was on the defensive end where you've seen a shift for this team.”
The Wolverines saw all of their preferred options disappear against the Fighting Irish. They averaged 21 three-point shots per game this season. They managed to put up just 10 on Sunday. And while Notre Dame sealed off the perimeter, it made it similarly difficult to get anything going inside, with Liatu King securing the paint. (King tied her season high with 15 rebounds.) The result was the lowest-scoring performance of the season for Michigan.
“It’s just a testament to what we've been working on all week,” said Hidalgo, who scored a game-high 21 points. “We've worked on ball screens. We worked on rotations, and so just to kind of see the carryover from us on the defensive end, it being something that's been so focused on, it's exciting to see because we know kind of the work we've put in.”
This offense has proven that it can be among the best in the country. Notre Dame can outshoot nearly anyone: Its 49% field-goal percentage this season is in the top three in Division I. But that shooting can bring the Irish only so far. Winning covers things up, as Ivey said, and it had covered up thin patches in this defense for weeks. Losing those last few games laid them bare. And they now look very different two weeks later. There are many ways to win, but taking hearts is a gritty, defensive business. If Notre Dame once forgot that, it seems to have relearned it.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Notre Dame Rediscovers Its Defensive Heart With Sweet 16 Berth .
