No. 2 Notre Dame Toughs Out Win To Open ACC Season
Gunning for an unprecedented fifth straight ACC regular season and ACC Tournament championship, the No. 2-ranked Fighting Irish (12-1) opened league play with an 87-72 victory versus Syracuse (12-2), which was No. 23 in the Coaches’ poll.
After suffering an ankle injury in Tuesday’s practice that made her a game-time decision on whether she would play, 6-4 junior Jessica. Shepard paced the attack with 24 points and 12 rebounds in 33 minutes.
“She just sucked it up and showed a lot of toughness out there today,” said Notre Dame head coach Muffet McGraw of Shepard’s sixth double-double this season and third in a row.
“I just came win with the mind-set that I was going to play,” Shepard said. “There was no time to kind of debate it. Once I was out there I just had to go out and play hard.”
Meanwhile, sophomore Jackie Young, who broke her nose earlier this month, wore a custom-made facemask for the first time and responded with 23 points on 10-of-16 shooting from the floor in 37 minutes.
“It’s great to see her get back to being aggressive and looking to score,” McGraw said.
“The first mask wasn’t mine, so we were just trying to make do,” said Young of shooting 6-of-19 her first two games with a makeshift mask. “My mask finally came in and I was able to actually see and move my neck a little bit. It helped a lot.”
Finally, senior forward Kathryn Westbeld, hobbled with her own ankle issues, remained the glue on the floor again with 16 points (6-of-8 shooting from the floor, including 3-of-3 from three-point range), five rebounds, four assists and four steals in 33 minutes. For the season, Westbeld is a sizzling 33-of-47 (.702 percentage) from the field.
The Irish built an early 15-6 lead but Syracuse went on a 9-0 run to tie the contest and stayed within striking distance mostly thereafter, taking its initial lead at 50-49 halfway through the third quarter.
The Orange took its final lead at 52-51 with 4:35 left in the third quarter on two free throws by Miranda Drummond before the crucial turning point came with an 11-0 Irish run for a 62-52 advantage. Shepard spearheaded that surge with seven of the first nine points.
Notre Dame opened the fourth quarter with an 8-0 spurt that soon became 17-3 to build its largest advantage at 81-63. The Irish shot 10-of-15 from the floor (66.7 percent) in that final 10-minute stretch while making several excellent passes on cuts to the bucket.
“That’s the way we should play for 40 minutes,” said McGraw of the fourth quarter. “Just really frustrated with our inability to defend. We can’t contain the ball, our rotation’s bad, we’re giving up threes — we have to find some answers and just continue to work hard at it … We have so much work to do on defense.”
Notre Dame out-scored the Orange 48-28 in the paint, and after a 27-17 deficit on the boards in the first half the Irish held a 23-12 advantage in the second. Also encouraging was a 7-of-14 effort beyond the arc after entering the game at a modest .300.
The first road outing in league play will be Sunday (Dec. 31) at Wake Forest.
Three-Point Play
1 .Late-Game Situations
This was the third straight home game where the Irish had to respond and came up huge either in the fourth quarter or in overtime in hard-earned wins versus DePaul (91-82), Marquette (91-85 in overtime) and now Syracuse (87-72).
The Irish shot 9-of-11 (81.8 percent) from the field in the fourth quarter versus DePaul, 5-of-7 (.714) in OT versus Marquette and 10-of-15 (.667) in the fourth against the Orange.
2. Defensive Doings
Graduate student Lili Thompson was 0-for-5 from the field, but she finished with four steals and made three superb plays on defense that helped spark Notre Dame’s late surge. Sooner or later the shots also need to start falling consistently for the two-time All-Pac 12 guard who scored more than 1,000 points at Stanford but is shooting at a .360 clip with the Irish.
3. League Dominance
Including the post-season tournament, the Irish are now 75-2 against ACC schools since joining for the 2013-14 season. They also are 33-0 at Purcell Pavilion in ACC play. Overall the past six years Notre Dame is 93-3 in league play and has won six straight regular season conference titles (2 Big East, 4 ACC).
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