LAS VEGAS – She strutted back to the huddle during a fourth-quarter timeout, not an ounce of emotion in McKenzie Forbes’ eyes, USC’s bench raucous and rowdy after another triple dropped home. Stone-cold.
On Tuesday, five days before a momentous, final Pac-12 showdown with Stanford, JuJu Watkins provided a simple insight into her worldview: the game of basketball is about who can adapt the fastest. For months, in a dazzling freshman season, it had been Watkins who’d adjusted, approaching a new scheme designed to slow her. Except it was Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer who adjusted to her on Sunday afternoon in the Pac-12 championship, throwing a trap at Watkins off every ball-screen, unwilling to repeat an earlier February outcome where Watkins had authored a 51-point Renaissance painting in Stanford’s gym.
And Watkins was stymied, a chance to single-handedly lead USC (25-5) to the final true Pac-12 title crumbling before her. She scored just 9 points on 2-of-15 shooting, going without a field goal in the first half, trudging to the bench after one sub in the second half and slumping her head between her legs.
An entire program picked her up, in a resounding statement of a 74-61 win over Stanford (28-4), dethroning the conference’s gold standard in the final game in the conference’s as-presently-constructed history.
It started with Forbes, answering the bat-signal as Watkins was relegated to the shadows, calling her own number and making tough shot after tough shot in a 26-point masterpiece. It continued with Rayah Marshall, the unflappable big battling for 30 minutes against a dominant Stanford frontcourt in a 10-point, 18-rebound scrap. It ended in sheer jubilation in Vegas, Forbes fittingly ending up dribbling out the clock as the buzzer sounded, shedding the veil of unflappability as she flung the ball over her head to the heavens.
At midcourt postgame, Forbes was presented with the Pac-12 Tournament MVP by ESPN’s Holly Rowe, breaking into…
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