LOS ANGELES — Thirty minutes after a late January win over Washington State, JuJu Watkins trudges into the media room at the Galen Center, a self-inflicted weight drooping her shoulders. She clutches a customary postgame smoothie. She wears a scowl.
As the freshman eases into a seat at USC’s press-conference podium, her eyes drill straight to the box score in front of her. 29 points. 10-of-27 FG. She scoffs at herself, shaking her head. The scoffs aren’t new. Terrible, she’s muttered after games, at her own shooting lines.
Her efficiency is down since Pac-12 play started. Her shot volume has only gone up. Off-balance layups. Forced pull-ups early in the shot clock. The questions come at the postgame dais, and a sickly sweet note of nitpicking seeps in for the first time all year. Watkins, her own fiercest critic, crosses her arms. Sips the smoothie. Ever so slightly, a cord of tension grows.
And Lindsay Gottlieb leans into the mic and snaps it.
“I’ma answer this one,” Gottlieb says, a slight smile at another question critiquing Watkins’ efficiency.
“We are playing Pac-12 teams,” she professes in the tone of a third-grade-teacher, fire steadily building behind her words.
“With the amount of responsibility she has for our team, I want her to feel like, ‘I can miss, and figure it out,’” Gottlieb says, as Watkins’ teammate McKenzie Forbes nods in approval.
Watkins has missed, and figured it out, across a remarkable freshman season leading a No. 1-seeded USC (26-5) to a first-round NCAA Tournament matchup with Texas A&M Corpus Christi on Saturday.
And Gottlieb has let her. In the two-week break since the Trojans’ Pac-12 Tournament win, Gottlieb had an assistant clip and compile every single coverage Watkins has faced this season, sitting down with her to go over film.
“Very long,” Gottlieb smiled Wednesday.
Watkins is an undisputable generational talent. She is also a collegiate freshman who leads the nation in usage rate….
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