NCAA Women's Final Four: Live Updates

Arizona went on a 7-0 run in the third quarter before Paige Bueckers made her third shot of the quarter with less than four minutes left. She has 13 points in the game after posting just five points before the half.

McDonald, a bit behind her 32-point per game pace over her last two contests, has 17 points, but the cast around her has produced as well. Sam Thomas has 8 points and Cate Reese has 9.

Christyn Williams leads the Huskies with 15 points. UConn’s 14-point deficit earlier in the quarter is the most the Huskies have trailed by all tournament.

Heading into the game, the Huskies had only trailed for 13 minutes, 22 seconds the entire time in San Antonio. They have trailed for 29 minutes, 18 seconds through three quarters against Arizona.

In ESPN’s bracket challenge for the women’s tournament, 30 percent of entries selected UConn as the national champion. The Huskies are down by 9 after three quarters. Only 1 percent of brackets picked Arizona (the Wildcats were less popular than all the other teams seeded 1-3).

Arizona fans trekked to San Antonio support their program’s first Final Four appearance. They have been chanting “U of A” and “defense” and jumping to their feet whenever Aari McDonald approaches the basket. And for good reason -- Arizona leads top-seeded UConn, 41-31, in the middle of the third quarter. UConn cheers are almost non-existent.

McDonald extended her longest active streak of scoring at least 10 points to 92 games. Sam Thomas has 8 points with 3 rebounds, but McDonald has carried the game, shooting at will and playing with tremendous confidence.

McDonald said during a halftime television interview that she practices by taking “hundreds and thousands” of shots. “It’s paying off and I’m loving it,” she said.

The Wildcats are shooting 38 percent, but perhaps most importantly have held the high-scoring Huskies to just 32 percent from the floor. UConn, which has lost just one game all season, has only attempted three shots from 3-point range, and hit just one, while the Wildcats hit six 3-pointers in the first half. The Huskies made just eight shots from the floor overall.

“I would describe our defense as suffocating and stingy,” McDonald said.

“It hit her foot,” Cooke said after the game. “They didn’t call a jump ball. That was it.”

Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s coach, noted the challenges of officiating.

“They’ve got a tough job,” she said. “There are dreams on the line. Everybody wants to compete for a national championship. I saw the kicked ball. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, but I don’t know what you want me to say. I can’t say much about it besides they’ve got a tough job.”

Speaking to reporters by videoconference after the game, Staley started a modest shift toward thinking about next season, particularly given how close the Gamecocks came to winning at the buzzer.

“The margin of error is that small — it’s that small to competing for a national championship, winning a national championship, and it won’t be our last time being in this situation,” she said. “Next year, we’ve just got to practice with margin of error in mind.”

Muhl, who has been dealing with her second ankle sprain of the season, was on crutches after she was injured in the first round. She had been day-to-day until Friday night. She played three minutes in the first, not generating any shots or getting on the score sheet after one quarter.

Led by Aari McDonald, who is averaging 32 points over her last two games, the Wildcats went on a 6-0 run early. She finished the quarter with 8 points, going 3-for-6 from the floor.

UConn, however, held Arizona down late in the frame with four consecutive scoreless minutes for the Wildcats. Arizona responded late, though, behind some late baskets from Sam Thomas.

UConn’s Paige Bueckers finished the quarter with 5 points and 3 rebounds.

So far the Wildcats are getting good looks against UConn, with three 3-point buckets in the first five minutes. Arizona leads, 9-5.

“I’ve had my ups and downs during my time here at UConn, everybody knows it,” Williams said after her 27 point game against Iowa. “It just feels really good to be able to play this basketball game as well as I did today, just to show the Christyn Williams I am, because I am a complete player and I feel people have forgotten that.”

Also important to the Huskies’ defense is Evina Westbrook, who is in her first season playing with the Huskies. She transferred from longtime Connecticut rival Tennessee, which declined to grant her immediate eligibility after she transferred in 2019. The 6-foot redshirt junior has been all over the court through the deepest tournament run of her career, nearly getting a triple-double in the round of 16.

Nelson-Ododa joined UConn with nearly as much media buzz as Bueckers, simply because of the 6-foot-4 player’s widely-circulated perfect score at the Powerade Jam Fest, an annual dunk contest for top high school players. She hasn’t jammed the ball yet in college, but has added another unlikely skill, especially for a player of her size: Nelson-Ododa has 11 assists in her last two games. Whether the Huskies can move on to the national championship game might come down to her ability to help her team find open looks.

Stanford hit five 3-pointers in the first three quarters to break the record spanning their five games of action in San Antonio. The Cardinal have been carried by their 3-point shooting all season, hitting 38.3 percent, seventh best in the nation before Friday night.

It wasn’t the most efficient shooting night for the Cardinal overall at 42 percent, but they hit 63 percent on 3-pointers, going 5-for-8. Jones made two of those, before her game-winning 2.

“Haley’s been working really hard,” said Stanford Coach Tara VanDerveer. “She’s really made a step up and she knows it. She’s not a freshman or a sophomore anymore, she’s a leader out there and the confidence she plays with, that was a real big shot for her.

“We credit their defense, they made it tough on people,” VanDerveer continued. “Thankfully, Haley was awesome.”

Stanford and South Carolina also set a Final Four record with 17 combined blocks, including 12 by the Cardinal.

But neither side gave up much in the relatively low-scoring game. Every time South Carolina came close, or even tied the Cardinal, Stanford pulled away — though not enough to feel comfortable. With four minutes left, it was a 4-point game; with a minute and a half left, Stanford had stretched to a 5-point lead thanks to a 3-pointer from 6-foot-4 Cameron Brink.

Then Destanni Henderson hit a 3-pointer late in the shot clock to give South Carolina a 1-point lead with 38.8 seconds left; and Haley Jones hit a 2-point shot to reclaim it.

Fans are on their feet for the last minute of this game, which hasn’t had more than 5 points of separation in the fourth quarter. Stanford leads, 64-62.

South Carolina tied the game early in the fourth quarter, but just as quickly its star center Aliyah Boston picked up her fourth foul. Stanford leads, 56-52.

Zia Cooke got hot from the 3-point arc, ending the third with 23 total points and shooting 5-for-7 on 3s, leading the Gamecocks on a 7-0 run. South Carolina isn’t a 3-point heavy team, usually tallying about four per game.

Despite a strong Stanford defensive performance holding the Gamecocks to 42 percent shooting, they haven’t had an answer for Cooke.

On the other end, Haley Jones has carried the Cardinal offense with 20 points, including 7 consecutive for her team at one point. She is 9 for 11 from the floor.

The Gamecocks, for their streakiness, haven’t been able to fully penetrate the Stanford depth despite huge showings from Cooke and Aliyah Boston, who has added 9 points, 11 rebounds and a game-high 5 blocks.

After losing a lead in the first quarter, South Carolina has tightened up the score thanks in large part to three third quarter 3-point shots from Zia Cooke. Though the Gamecocks briefly tied the game, Stanford is still ahead, 45-43.

Zia Cooke finally scored midway through the quarter; she leads South Carolina with 12 points.

From there, South Carolina began to score again.

Aliyah Boston made a pair of key blocks to stop Stanford’s run. She has four blocks along with nine rebounds.

Ashten Prechtel’s late 3-pointer helped Stanford keep its advantage.

The Cardinal’s Haley Jones finished the half with 9 points, all coming in the first quarter.

But Staley expressed concerns about Emmert’s plan to have a law firm conduct a review of inequities at N.C.A.A. championship events.

“Whoever is paying the piper, more than likely they’re going to give you what you want to hear,” said Staley, who asked Emmert whether someone independent of coaches or the N.C.A.A. could be asked to investigate.

Emmert asserted that the association had no previous history with the firm it had retained for the review, but he acknowledged the potential issue.

“I understand there’s both the reality and the perception. I have a high level of confidence in their independence in reality, but I also understand that there’s this perceptional issue out there and that’s what you’re asking about.”

Emmert said he would “continue to look at it and see what we can do to make sure everybody knows that this is being looked at with completely wide-open eyes and without biases.”

Auriemma said he was concerned about how women’s sports programs were treated on campuses nationwide. And he wondered aloud whether women’s basketball should operate somewhat separately.

“I hate to say this because I hate to give those people any credit, but college football coaches, they decided ‘we’re not dealing with this’ and they’ve gone completely rogue and they’re uncontrollable,” Auriemma said with a light chuckle. “They’re a runaway train and God bless you for trying to hold onto that operation. But maybe that’s what has to happen in women’s basketball — maybe women’s basketball’s got to separate itself from the other women’s sports. But then that would be unfair because we’d be leaving a lot of people behind who need our help.”

Auriemma’s thoughts should not be seen as a sign of an imminent overhaul of the sport: The question of whether women’s sports should operate separately from the N.C.A.A., in whole or in part, has now been a subject of debate for more than four decades. But plenty of coaches and executives have been publicly and privately musing these last few weeks over how their women’s basketball could be better run.

The Cardinal before they ripped off a 9-0 run at the end of the quarter, putting the Gamecocks in a scoring drought of just over four minutes in the process. Haley Jones finished the quarter with 9 points.

Stanford opened shooting 43 percent, while the Gamecocks shot 38 percent in the first quarter.

Cameron Brink, normally a starter and strong post presence for Stanford, pulled a hamstring in the Cardinal’s game against Louisville and was going in and out in the first quarter of the semifinals. Her mother said on Wednesday that trainers told her hamstring injuries are finicky and they were hoping to rest her when possible.

Good reminder here that Haley Jones was the No. 1 recruit in last year’s freshman class. She has 9 of Stanford’s 13 points.

The bands might not be present, but they’re playing the South Carolina fight song at the Alamodome after the Gamecocks forced four Stanford turnovers in the first five minutes. South Carolina leads, 15-6, with a little more than four minutes left in the first quarter.

The team spent nine weeks of its season away from its Northern California campus, at points playing “home games” in a beach town about 45 miles away, while the county where the university is in prohibited contact sports. Parents were unable to come into contact with their children or see them play from the stands for much of the season.

“You forget what it is like to make eye contact with her as she’s coming off the court going into the locker room,” Michelle Bain-Brink, the mother of freshman forward Cameron Brink, said.

Bain-Brink had not seen her daughter play for the Cardinal until the Pac-12 tournament, which Stanford won, last month in Las Vegas.

Back in the stands, the 300-person block of Stanford’s family and friends are taking their job of cheering very seriously, opening up the national semifinal game between Stanford and South Carolina with cheers of “Let’s go Stanford.”

It is Stanford’s second competition today — just a few hours before coming to the Alamodome, the Cardinal crowned its table tennis tournament champion.

Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Stefanie Dolson and Tina Charles played for UConn. South Carolina had A’ja Wilson Nneka Ogwumike went to Stanford. South Carolina Coach Dawn Staley is also the Coach of the U.S. national team, but she has left training camp to her assistants while she focuses on leading the Gamecocks deeper in the N.C.A.A. tournament.

Some of the players are likely to remain on hand to cheer on their teams — and to scope out their future competition. “Obviously her quickness is her biggest asset, her ability to go anywhere at any time,” Bird said this week of Arizona senior Aari McDonald, a possible top-10 pick in the upcoming W.N.B.A. draft. “Her kind of game translates to the W.N.B.A. well so it will be fun to watch her go against Connecticut.”

Starters have sometimes benefited, too — if a team can rely on bench players to stay in games, that allows more room for starters to carry their teams if needed late in games.

“The bench, it’s a big part of who we are, and being able to go deep in our bench is going to be so important, especially down the stretch right now,” said South Carolina’s Laeticia Amihere, who had 10 points and 8 rebounds while playing 17 minutes in her team’s regional final rout of Texas on Tuesday.

Amihere, who plays with a heavy knee brace as she has had to recover from two ligament tears, is like a secret weapon for the Gamecocks off the bench.

“Especially in a tournament right now, we got to come up big,” she said. “We’ve got to come up big because the bench is a big part of who we are. Being able to go deep in our bench is going to be so important, especially down the stretch right now.”

When Stanford trailed 38-26 at halftime to Louisville in the round of 8, it turned to its bench in the second half. Ashten Prechtel scored 16 points in 16 minutes, replacing starter Kiana Williams who went just 1 for 11 in the opening 20 minutes. The Cardinal went on a 17-2 run in the third quarter behind the energy Pretchel brought.

“It probably looks like I should have put her in in the first half,” Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer said. “Maybe watching the first half she understood what to do better. Obviously you can’t expect someone to go 6-for-6 every game but I liked how she rebounded, she finished inside. She looked very confident.”

“Having depth like that, where everyone is excited for the other players, is really important,” she added.

Smaller bench contributions have also made a difference. In Arizona’s round of 8 win over Indiana, the Wildcats bench outscored their counterparts, 8-0 to help in the 66-53 win.

That contribution helps especially when Aari McDonald has dominated for Arizona with 64 points in her last two games.

UConn has been the outlier among the final quartet in this tournament, even though it has talented players throughout its roster. In its round of 8 win over Baylor, only one bench player got into the lineup.