JuJu Watkins Is Putting It All Together
It’s one thing to have all-world talent; it’s another thing to know how to use it. After torching top-ranked UCLA, USC’s star sophomore is showing how she’s realizing her tremendous potential.
Outside the Galen Center on Thursday, a sea of crimson-and-gold-clad fans huddled underneath umbrellas, weathering rainstorms and gridlock to watch JuJu Watkins and no. 6–ranked USC take on their crosstown rivals, top-ranked UCLA.
The masses had gathered to see what JuJu would do in the marquee clash. But at the start of the third quarter, National Player of the Year favorite Lauren Betts, the 6-foot-7 sun of UCLA’s solar system, was seizing the spotlight and powering a 10-0 run that erased USC’s lead and neutralized Watkins’s 25 first-half points. It looked, for a brief moment, like the culmination of a season-long parable: With depth, size, and shooting, the underappreciated Bruins were showing that they deserved as much hype as the glitzy proprietors of the celebrity-speckled Galen Center.
UCLA had captured the attention of everyone in the arena, including Watkins, whose gears were turning. The Trojans called timeout, and Watkins found Clarice Akunwafo, tasked with guarding Betts, and told her she’d have her back. From that point on, Watkins doubled aggressively on UCLA’s star center, a strategy that helped fuel a 20-4 fourth-quarter run that handed USC its first win against a no. 1–ranked team since 1983.
Watkins delivered with her biggest performance of the season, finishing with 38 points, five assists, and 11 rebounds against the best rebounding team in the nation, per Her Hoop Stats. She also blocked a career-high eight shots, many of them at the expense of Betts. According to Alexa Philippou, Watkins notched 35 points, five blocks, and five assists, which hadn’t been done in Division I women’s basketball in the past 20 years.
“We know we’re not champions today. We’re not where we want to go, but to just recognize the atmosphere, the crowd, the individual growth process, things that I see on our teams,” said USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb. “I will remember this defensive performance. We will be talking about this with our coaching staff years from now. JuJu’s heroic shotmaking—the effort, the intensity, especially coming after the million questions she gets when it’s not perfect out there.”
Indeed, in the 11 games since USC beat UConn on December 21, Watkins shot just 27 percent from beyond the arc and 39.5 percent inside it. The Trojans dropped a game against unranked Iowa two weeks ago, and Watkins went 5-for-21 against Ohio State last weekend. As UCLA coach Cori Close mournfully grumbled after the game, Watkins’s six first-half 3s were as many as she’d made in her previous five games, blowing the Bruins’ game plan to smithereens.
Fans, in the end, experienced one of the chief joys of a young star working through the ebbs and flows of development: a plateau turning into a breakthrough. Beyond the smooth pull-up and the game-changing defense was her ability to assess what the game demanded and take command. When her teammates struggled to score, she picked up the slack. In the second and third quarters, she was the only Trojan to hit a shot. And when Betts threatened to take the game over, Watkins answered the call.
Betts’s combination of size, speed, skill, and playmaking, alongside the Bruins’ spacing, has made UCLA’s offense an unsolvable puzzle for every other team in the nation. Opponents must make a choice between playing Betts one-on-one and leaving another shooter wide open. Watkins, however, has the size, speed, confidence, and anticipatory ability to double Betts and close out in time to force a missed shot from one of her teammates.
Take, for example, the play when Watkins blocked Gabriela Jaquez in the first quarter after JuJu forced Betts to kick the ball out to her:
Betts, who’s shot 62 percent from the field this season, was held to a season-low 38 percent on Thursday, much of it due to the physical, disciplined defense of Akunwafo and Watkins’s help-side magic.
With 2:30 left to go in the game, Watkins hovered in the paint, blocked Betts at the zenith of her fadeaway jumper, secured the rebound, went coast-to-coast in transition, and dumped the ball off to KiKi Iriafen, who made a layup through contact and got the whistle.
UCLA’s two made 3-pointers were a season low. So was its offensive rating. Most of UCLA’s opponents have to choose between doubling Betts and defending the 3-point line. Watkins, when it mattered, shut down both.
“A big jump from freshman year to sophomore year is you kinda know what’s going on,” Gottlieb said earlier in the season to describe Watkins’s defensive evolution. “Freshman year, you use your talent and figure it out on the fly. When you’re half a second quicker to the spot, when you know what’s coming, if you’re jumping to the ball and the back screen’s coming, then your athleticism and your talent comes out even more. She’s in the right place at the right time.”
If Watkins’s 51-point performance against Stanford was the crown jewel of her freshman campaign last year, a demonstration of all she was capable of then, this game is her sophomore corollary. As a freshman, Watkins was sprawling and versatile, a transition terror with a deep isolation bag, nascent playmaking ability, and two-way potential, tantalizing the imagination by offering a multitude of pathways for future development. But she was also in the beginning of a raw and exploratory stage. Like a rookie conductor tasked with directing a full-sized orchestra, she didn’t always know how and when to use all the tools at her disposal. On Thursday, we saw her intuition catch up to her talent.
Watkins is now realizing her tremendous abilities in real time, peeling back the layers and learning as she goes along. “I didn’t plan on having that many blocks, but I think that’s what we needed to win, so just any way I can help out, that’s my goal,” Watkins said. “It’s not really a calculated thing. It’s just like a feel for the game. I kinda let my mind take over.”
It’s one thing to have game-changing talent. It’s another to understand, in the moment, what’s necessary and how to adjust accordingly. It’s a whole other thing to understand, as Watkins did, the psychological influence of a tactical decision: “It was just important that [our frontcourt] knew that the guards have their back, and we’re all in it together,” Watkins added.
USC’s budding leader is beginning to understand that power isn’t just about what you wield but learning when and how to maximize its impact.
