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Notre Dame runs out of gas in ACC Tournament semifinals loss to Duke

IMG_9992by:Tyler Horka•about 22 hours•

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Notre Dame defends Duke in the ACC Tournament. (Photo courtesy of the ACC)

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Can’t win if you can’t score. Nothing new. Not a novel concept. Notre Dame still experienced it the hard way, though, at the Greensboro Coliseum on Saturday, and the Fighting Irish’s ACC Tournament stay is over as a result.

No. 3 seed Duke beat No. 2 seed Notre Dame, 61-56, in the semifinals to set up an all-North Carolina championship game against No. 1 seed NC State on Sunday. The Irish, meanwhile, head home and await an NCAA Tournament designation in a week.

“Just real frustrated with the performance today,” Notre Dame head coach Niele Ivey said. “Didn’t feel like we played our game defensively. Took us a while to get ourselves going. Something that I have to fix when we get back, get the opportunity to get back to practice.”

It’ll likely be a No. 2 seed for the Irish (26-5), but they have not been playing like one of the best five to eight teams in the country lately. Notre Dame has lost three of its last five games. This latest one to Duke was the most concerning of them all. Ivey’s team, one of the highest scoring squads in the nation all year, simply could not put the ball in the bucket against a feisty defensive Duke team.

Ivey said it’s because the Irish weren’t on the run enough. Duke head coach Kara Lawson echoed that same sentiment, citing that as the main reason why she flipped the script from the Blue Devil’s 64-59 loss to Notre Dame three weeks ago.

“We got them into the half court more times to go against our half-court defense in this game than we did in the first game,” Lawson said.

Hal-court situations were no fun for the Irish.

Sophomore guard Hannah Hidalgo was the Irish’s only consistent source of scoring throughout the afternoon, but even she needed 22 shot attempts to tally 23 points. No other Irish player attempted double-digit shots, and senior guard Olivia Miles was the only other player in double figures in the scoring column. She got there via an inconsequential layup with one second remaining.

The lack of contributions come as no surprise to anyone who tuned in for the full 40 minutes. Really, it only took watching a few sequences in the second half to see that Notre Dame was flustered, stagnant and subsequently ineffective on offense.

Duke relentlessly pressured the ball on the perimeter. It constantly forced Notre Dame to be behind in what it was trying to draw up in the half court. In a span of a few third-quarter possessions, the Irish settled for a 35-foot three-point heave from Miles just before the shot clock buzzer and two frantic turnovers with fewer than five seconds left on the shot clock. And if it wasn’t something like that, it was hero ball from Hidalgo and either a circus make or understandable miss.

“We don’t want to play in the half court,” senior guard Sonia Citron said. “I know obviously sometimes we have to, but we get our momentum and our energy from transition, and in order to be in transition, we have to get stops. So that’s something that we need to be able to rely on.”

When that’s the case over and over and over again, well, you know what they say about the definition of insanity. It seems like insanity for this Notre Dame team, the former No. 1 team in the country, to be where it’s at heading into March Madness — searching for offensive answers with not much time to find them. But that’s reality, and Ivey’s got two weeks to come up with some before the big dance begins.

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