Cards neutralize another Hannah Hidalgo flourish in upending Notre Dame WBB
Notre Dame’s last look at Louisville a season ago, was a humbling 62-38 loss in the ACC Tourney semifinals in which the Irish offense, sans All-American Olivia Miles, stagnated and flailed throughout.
The 12th-ranked Irish on Thursday night at Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center repeated that script long enough to fall into a 13-2 hole against the 15th-ranked Cardinals and intermittently at key points thereafter in a 73-66 loss in which they never led and were tied (2-2) for all of 56 seconds.
Miles looked on from the bench at the venue where her 2022-23 season came to an end due to a knee injury that prompted her to commit to sitting out the entirety of this season. And she watched her teammates start 0-for-8 shooting from the field and commit three turnovers before head coach Niele Ivey called timeout at the 5:10 mark of the first quarter to recalibrate.
“I don’t think we started strong mentally,” Ivey said. “I thought we got the stops we needed, but then shot selection, turnovers didn’t really allow us to get in a flow. So, I would credit that to some quick shots and turnovers.
“I thought defensively, we did a good job of following the game plan, and offensively it really took us a while to find our flow. And that could be the excitement of the game or could be just obviously this type of matchup.”
If that’s the case, the Irish (17-5, 7-4) don’t have much time to figure out how to fix it, given that five of their last seven regular-season games are against teams likely to be in this year’s NCAA Tournament field, including a rematch with the Cardinals (20-4, 9-2) March 3 in South Bend in the regular-season finale.
Next up is a road test at Florida State (17-7, 8-4) on Sunday, followed by a home clash next Thursday night against No. 3 NC State (20-3, 8-3), an upset victim itself at home Thursday night of No. 16 Virginia Tech (19-4, 10-2), another future Irish opponent.
“We fought our way back,” Ivey said. “It was a two-possession game with a minute and a half left. So, I really liked the fight in our team, but our mental lapses really allowed them to gain confidence and really capitalize off our mistakes on offense and defense.
“That’s what we’re going to go back and watch, and what I talked about after the game. We have to eliminate the mental lapses, because teams capitalize on our mistakes.”
Even a dominant second-half showing by Notre Dame freshman Hannah Hidalgo couldn’t rescue the Irish.
The 5-foot-6 replacement for Miles at point guard this season, scored 22 of her 30 points in the second half and finished with seven steals, breaking two more long-standing records in the process.
With 551 points on the season, the nation’s third-leading scorer blew by Shari Matvey’s 44-year-old school record for most points by a freshman. And with Hidalgo’s 112th steal (she now has 113), she broke North Carolina’s Marion Jones’ ACC freshman record for steals, set 30 season ago. Two more thefts, and she’ll take down Skylar Diggins’ Notre Dame single-season record for steals for all classes.
One of the reasons the sensational performance by Hidalgo went benign is because collectively the Irish only made two of the 18 3-point attempts. It was an unlikely scenario, given Notre Dame came into the game shooting .362 from the arc — 27th nationally — and Louisville came in ranked 204th in defending it (.312).
“I thought they had the right looks,” Ivey said. “They just didn’t drop for us tonight.”
Notre Dame’s overall shooting percentage (.406) was well off the .499 mark it came into the game with on the road, ranking second nationally in that stat category.
Sonia Citron and Maddy Westbeld were both held in single digits (9 points apiece) and were a combined 7-of-23 from the field and 2-of-10 from the arc.
As a team, the Irish amassed just 11 assists. They’ve lost all four games in which they’ve had 12 or fewer.
Another factor that kept Louisville’s lead from evaporating when Hidalgo heated up was Cardinal forward Nyla Harris. The 6-2 sophomore nearly doubled her season scoring average (9.9) with a career-high 19 points on 9-of-11 shooting. She also helped Louisville to a 42-36 rebounding edge with a game-high 10, four of those on the offensive end.
“We talked about before [the game] that she was going to work hard,” Irish senior forward Kylee Watson said, “and most of our points were basically outworking us.”
Watson led the Irish in rebounding (8), and added seven points, two blocked shots and three steals in 35 minutes.
“I thought she was solid, just evenness, just her presence,” Ivey said of Watson.. “Hannah did a great job of scoring, just carrying the team on her back offensively, but defensively we had a lot of mental lapses.”
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