Caitlin Clark hasn’t beaten the game just yet. She avenged last year’s title game loss with a 94-87 win Monday against LSU, the final boss of the 2023 women’s college basketball season. But there are two more levels for her and the Hawkeyes to get past before she can finally complete the mission she’s been stuck on for four years: winning a national championship. As Clark told Holly Rowe following Iowa’s Elite Eight win, “The job’s not finished.”
The road only gets tougher from here. Just to get back to the title game, Iowa will have to topple Connecticut, the most successful program in modern college basketball on both the men’s and women’s sides. UConn may not be the powerhouse it once was, but it has Paige Bueckers, who could be the top pick in the 2025 WNBA draft, and Geno Auriemma, who remains one of the sport’s best tacticians. The Huskies have the personnel and coaching to push Iowa to its limits. And should Iowa advance, South Carolina will likely be lurking—and ready to shut down Iowa’s prolific offense. Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks haven’t lost all season, and they own the nation’s most efficient defense, anchored by SEC Defensive Player of the Year Kamilla Cardoso. Plus, after losing to Iowa in last year’s Final Four, Staley’s team will have extra motivation. If Clark does indeed end her college career with a ring, she will have more than earned it.
But after Monday night’s triumph, it feels like this is Clark’s tournament to lose. She dropped a chill 41-12-7 on Kim Mulkey and Angel Reese. If those two were unable to slow her down, do Connecticut and South Carolina stand a chance? If Clark just beat last year’s final boss, what does that make her?
Based on last year’s final, LSU looked like a team that was built to solve the Caitlin Clark problem. It had a talented backcourt, an elite rim protector in Reese, and one of the game’s best coaching staffs to draw up the game plan. Mulkey’s objective was to pick up Clark as soon as she crossed half court, and she gave the assignment to Hailey Van Lith. But it was clear from Iowa’s opening possession that Van Lith, who is 5 inches shorter than Clark, was no match for the nation’s leading scorer. Clark hit her opening shot after Van Lith got caught going under a screen—a bold choice against the best shooter in college basketball.
A couple of possessions later, Clark breezed by Van Lith on an isolation play for her second bucket.
Even when Van Lith wasn’t directly guarding Clark, she was still tormented by the Hawkeyes superstar. The first of Clark’s 12 assists came on a backdoor pass that beat a ball-watching Van Lith.
Mulkey pulled Van Lith from the game after the early defensive lapses, and, to Van Lith’s credit, she played tighter defense when she returned to the floor, but … it just didn’t make much of a difference. Van Lith was right there on so many of Clark’s shots, but she didn’t have enough height to bother them. I can’t blame her for doing the reverse Jordan shrug in the fourth quarter after another Clark 3 put Iowa up 80-69.
Mulkey also tried Last-Tear Poa on Clark—she didn’t fare much better than Van Lith—and even Flau’jae Johnson, the Tigers’ best perimeter defender. Mulkey caught some heat for not putting Johnson on Clark sooner, but the sophomore was LSU’s main source of offense, and she was dealing with foul trouble. Chasing Clark, who draws over six fouls per game on average, up and down the court would have been extreme and would have impacted Johnson’s game on the offensive end. There’s give and take with every coaching decision, and players of Clark’s caliber put coaches in an impossible bind. That’s not a problem that can be solved with X’s and O’s.
“There’s not a whole lot of strategy,” Mulkey said after the game. “You gotta guard her. Nobody else seems to be able to guard her. We didn’t even guard her last year when we beat ’em. She’s just a generational player, and she just makes everybody around her better. That’s what the great ones do.”
In the postgame handshake line, Mulkey told Clark, “I sure am glad you’re leaving. … Girl, you something else. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
She’s right. We’ve never seen anything like this. The Steph Curry comp is obvious because of Clark’s unlimited range, but Curry wasn’t bigger and stronger than his defenders when he was at Davidson. He was quicker and more skilled than them. Clark is all of those things. She is good at everything. She ranks above the 90th percentile in every half-court play type that Synergy tracks. She didn’t have enough post-ups to qualify for the leaderboard in that stat, but her 1.37 points-per-possession average would have ranked in the top 20 nationally.
Caitlin Clark’s Scoring by Play Type, 2023-24 Season (Synergy)
Mulkey couldn’t find defensive answers against her because there are no answers. Clark hasn’t been held to under 24 points in any game in which she played at least 30 minutes this season. No team has been able to stop her. And look at this shot chart. Her 41 points against LSU were scored with a high degree of difficulty.
Clark has been brilliant throughout the season, and she’s getting more help as of late. Iowa wouldn’t have won on Monday without Kate Martin’s 21 points. Hannah Stuelke had her hands full guarding Reese, but she was coming off of back-to-back double-doubles and has had some big scoring nights over the past few months—including a 47-point performance against Penn State in February. Clark isn’t the only player on this team who can put the ball in the basket.
Iowa was framed as the underdog against LSU based on how last year’s matchup went down, but the Hawkeyes were slight favorites according to sportsbooks, and they also have the best scorer in college basketball history on their roster. They are favored by a couple of points in Friday’s game against Connecticut and would be only slight underdogs against a South Carolina team that’s 36-0. The Hawkeyes aren’t a group of plucky 3-point shooters from the farms of Iowa. This is a scary basketball team, and Clark is the scariest player in basketball right now.
“They had a kid score 21 and [another score] 18,” Mulkey said on Monday. “[Clark] had 12 assists. Caitlin Clark’s not going to beat you by herself. It’s what she does to make those other teammates better that helps her score points—helps them score to beat you.”
Clark’s game had the LSU coach talking in circles, but what she’s saying is accurate: Clark makes everyone better, and when her teammates make shots, it becomes impossible to contain her.
That’s the challenge UConn and South Carolina will have to overcome to win a national title. To beat Iowa, the Huskies will have to lean heavily on Bueckers’s talent and Auriemma’s tactical knowledge. Connecticut has no depth due to injuries, and as was the case for LSU with Johnson, using Bueckers to defend Clark will have consequences on the other end. South Carolina, meanwhile, has enough perimeter defense to match up with Clark on isolation plays, but the pick-and-roll game, which is where a lot of Clark’s production comes from in the half court, could be tricky. Staley likes to play Cardoso in “drop” coverage, meaning she’ll hang back a few feet below the screen and stay in position to protect the rim. That’s where she’s at her best.
But look at all that space in between Cardoso and the ball. That’s too much space to give Clark. And Iowa sets its screens closer to half court, which creates even more room for Clark to pull up against dropping bigs. Staley doesn’t want Cardoso out on the perimeter trying to guard Clark—that’s also a losing strategy—but that would be the only way to close the gap. There are no right answers.
Auriemma and Staley are elite coaches, but so is Mulkey. Don’t be surprised if they fall into LSU’s same basic plan: compete their way and pray Clark misses. After all, she’s played in 137 collegiate games; every strategy has been tried at this point. An off night for her might just be the only chance teams have against this year’s new final boss.
