With best player on the bench, USC didn’t skip a beat

The moment seemed daunting when A’ja Wilson left South Carolina’s Elite Eight game against Florida State with her second foul.

The next 10 minutes seemed surreal.

When a star of her caliber goes out of a big game, the hope is to hang on and survive.

But what happened speaks to the subtle dominance of the program Dawn Staley has built.

After the first five minutes of Wilson’s absence, a five-point lead had grown to 11. The junior Wooden Award finalist played all of 21 seconds in the third quarter before committing a foul, and the lead ticked up to 16, before a Seminole burst got it to 10 at the start of the fourth quarter.

Players and coaches said nothing changed on the bench when Wilson went out. These things happen, and you deal with it.

“She didn’t start coaching any differently,” guard Kaela Davis said of Staley. “She didn’t say anything different. We try not to skip a beat. And Florida State’s a team that maybe, I felt like they thought they were going to take advantage of that. But we couldn’t let them.”

Staley said her staff embraced it instead of fretting, showing players they should do the same.

Davis and Allisha Gray have experience being top options, and freshman Tyasha Harris also stepped up. Reserve wing Doniyah Cliney was a beast on the boards, while Mikiah Herbert Harrigan battled an imposing FSU frontcourt. Everyone did their part.

Still, one of the best players in the country left the floor, and her teammates handled an Elite Eight team with little stress.

The easy explanation would be to downplay the Seminoles, but that’s a team that fell behind 21-4 to a good Oregon State team and won by 13 ( OSU earned a Pac-12 title ahead of Stanford, who USC will face in the Final Four). Four of FSU’s starters were top-six players on the squad that nearly denied the Gamecocks’ Final Four dreams two years ago, and they rallied in the late going.

But the Seminoles were held off by a workmanlike effort from a team down its top two frontcourt options (Wilson and double-double machine Alaina Coates).

South Carolina was so good, not only did it not falter, it kept those 15 minutes basically drama-free. That’s rare. That’s depth, but it’s also culture and approach.

Staley and this group will go on to Dallas, play Stanford and aim for another shot at UConn. It’s a group that had, numerous reasons one could say, “They got this far, and that’s not bad considering the circumstances.”

Yet here they are, back where they wanted to be.

This story was originally published March 29, 2017 at 7:05 AM with the headline "With best player on the bench, USC didn’t skip a beat."