The maddening statistic that more than intermittently looked like a potential dead end for the Notre Dame women’s basketball team from the outside looking in this past season — turnovers — turned out to be a red herring.
And yet perhaps something much less complicated to address than what Irish head coach Niele Ivey must actually confront heading into her sixth season leading the program.
That’s, above all, how she needs to evolve her coaching.
And that would be true whatever Olivia Miles had decided to do with her remaining year of college eligibility and freshman Kate Koval and medical redshirt freshman Emma Risch with their remaining three.
And also whether or not they provide the final personnel shockwaves of this offseason, with Miles' reported deferment of the WNBA Draft cycle to plunge into the transfer portal and Koval and the oft-injured Risch with the intentions of transferring as well.
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What leaves no wiggle room, in terms of the future of the ND program, is that Ivey can be both part of the problem and part of the solution to the Irish flaming out in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16, 71-62, to a transfer-portal spectacle in TCU that got exposed and bounced by double digits two days later in the Elite Eight by top seed Texas …
A team that Irish (28-6) took down in overtime in December without two key experienced front court players in Maddy Westbeld and Liza Karlen.
As far as the TCU game on Saturday in Birmingham, Ala., the Irish committed five turnovers — matching the lowest total of the Ivey coaching era at ND, set in last year’s Sweet 16 thud to Oregon State.
In fact, in only one of their six losses this season — Nov. 30 to Utah in the Cayman Islands — did the Irish lose the turnover battle. That’s also true of their three biggest wins, over two teams dancing in the Final Four in Tampa this weekend, Texas and UConn, and the team that UConn eliminated Monday night, USC, as its star, JuJu Watkins, sat out with an ACL tear.
What was the common thread in the losses?
Ivey will tell you, at least in press conferences, it was a regression in attention to playing elite defense. And there were moments in the games that turned a sure-No. 1 seed into a No. 3 after the Irish cobbled together a 19-game win streak, where there were swaths of what Ivey described.
But the larger issue is that really good teams with really good coaches were able to make Notre Dame look unrecognizable, from the statistically dominant team that it was for most of the year, particularly on offense.
And Ivey either didn’t have a counterpunch or was unwilling to concoct one to toggle successfully into a halfcourt team when the Irish needed to win games that way. The same could be said for the lack of defensive adjustments.
Stack the Irish up against the Final Four teams — UConn, Texas, South Carolina and UCLA — in 14 key statistical categories, and Notre Dame is first among those schools in five of those categories (scoring offense, steals, 3-point percentage, 3-point percentage defense and free-throw shooting) and only fifth/last in two of the 14.
If Ivey is truly open to taking the next step as a strategist, she needs to adapt the mantra from one of her program’s biggest fans — Notre Dame head football coach Marcus Freeman. And that’s: Question everything.
That includes recruiting. That includes doing business in the portal — something ND will have to do in unprecedented volume this offseason. That includes sports science and injury prevention. That includes being proactive about team chemistry instead of throwing a few kumbayas at potential fault lines.
Which brings it all back to Miles, for the moment.
What looks like a giant kiss-off to some and a shrewd business decision to others is more accurately a math problem with all kinds of emotions and lots of layers baked in.
It’s accurate that Miles, and other top college stars, can command way more from poaching schools in compensation than the $78,831 WNBA rookie salary the top four picks are scaled to make in 2025. That’s true even if you include all four years of the escalating rookie contract that tops out at $100,510 in year 4.
The calculus is very different on the men’s side vs. the NBA, where the top four rookie picks are expected to command between $8.3 million for pick 4 and $11.5 million for the No. 1 draft choice in year 1.
But for Miles, no matter what the numbers looked like, no matter what Notre Dame was willing to and able to answer with, you couldn’t blame her if part of her thinking was, “if not now — as in this past season — then when?” As in merging the dream of a national title with the reality of one.
But this offseason is even more of an inflection point for Ivey, because a rebuilding year is as plausible as a redemption run at this point.
What would be encouraging signs of the latter?
Among the key ones: Sophomore All-American Hannah Hidalgo staying put, grad senior center Kylee Watson electing to return from a year off from an ACL tear, continued offensive evolution from defensive stalwart Cass Prosper.
A transformative summer for freshman center Kate Koval would have been on the list as well. Now finding a replacement moves up the list.
What went wrong with the 6-5 Ukraine native bears revisiting. Bringing her along at a deliberate pace once Karlen returned from injury in December and Westbeld in January was smart, but not ramping up that development and those opportunities in February ahead of tournament time was a squandered opportunity for Ivey.
Even if Koval didn’t fit in the uptempo, transition game Ivey wanted to bludgeon teams with, Koval did fit into the halfcourt alternative the Irish were at times forced to play. And could have been an important defensive piece in the NCAA Tournament as well.
Instead, ESPNw’s No. 5 recruit overall and No. 1 center in the 2024 class is an enigma, but one with still quite a bit of promise. A promise that fill now be fulfilled or reneged on elsewhere.
Perhaps the most perplexing postscript on Ivey’s fifth season was the way she said goodbye to seniors Sonia Citron and Miles, and grad Westbeld, in the TCU postgame press conference.
“I am just really grateful for what they have done for me and for our program,” Ivey said. “It's a resurgence of the program taking over, and they've left it better than what they came in with.”
Better than what they came in with?
They did follow a 13-18 team in 2020, with Hall-of-Famer Muffet McGraw announcing her retirement shortly thereafter in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Citron’s and Miles’ freshman season was just three years removed from a national title, and two years removed from a one-point loss to Baylor in the 2019 title game.
And yet here we are in 2025, with a fourth straight Sweet 16 run feeling like a massive disappointment, juxtaposed with the transfer portal for women’s hoops open until the end of the day on April 23. For perspective's sake, the nation's No. 1 scorer, Florida State guard Ta'Niya Latson, is already in there.
But the more important perspective is: This is the start of a critical offseason that could redefine the Ivey chapter of Notre Dame’s women’s basketball or a time for Ivey to dig her heels in for more of the same.
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