Notre Dame's record-breaking starters close in on milestone

CHICAGO

None of those past buckets will be worth any points when Notre Dame faces Stanford on Monday night with a Final Four spot at stake, but early on, the Irish starters will score a point that gives them a milestone no other NCAA Division I women’s or men’s basketball quintet has ever even sniffed.

“I mean, that is pretty amazing,” Arike Ogunbowale conceded about ND’s fivesome of herself, Jessica Shepard, Brianna Turner, Marina Mabrey and Jackie Young closing in on 10,000 combined career points.

Until the Irish blew by the previous women’s standard merely halfway through this season, a 2017-18 quintet from Ohio State owned it at 8,492. On the men’s side, the record is 8,216 by a group that played together for North Carolina in 2008-09.

“I think we have really five All-Americans on the court,” Ogunbowale said. “Even if they didn’t put us on the list, we have five All-Americans on the court.”

According to Ogunbowale, by virtue of being on the floor with four teammates “that can score 30 on any given night, each one of us is just amazing, and I think that’s a credit to the coaches recruiting us and getting great players and developing us.”

With Ogunbowale at a program-record 2,551, Shepard at 2,298, Turner at 1,976, Mabrey at 1,856 and Young at 1,311, the starters for the top-seeded Irish are idling at 9,992 heading into Monday’s matchup against the second-seeded Cardinal.

“Yeah, that’s something that’s hard to kind of wrap your head around,” Shepard acknowledged of the group approaching 10 grand, “but I think it’s just due to the coaches putting us in the position to score, and then just us being willing to play together.”

“It’s pretty exciting,” ND coach Muffet McGraw said, “(because) men’s or women’s, that’s never been done before. I think it’s just interesting because of the way the class settled in, with Bri coming back for the fifth year, Jess coming in. So ... that is five All-Americans on the floor at the same time.”

Turner redshirted last season after suffering a knee injury the previous March.

Ogunbowale and Mabrey arrived at Notre Dame a year after Turner. Young, the lone junior, came aboard the following season.

Shepard joined the team before last season as a transfer from Nebraska.

Even if her 1,112 points with the Cornhuskers were subtracted, she and the rest of the Irish quintet still already own the record at 8,880.

“More impressive, I think, are the assists,” McGraw said of a key enabler to ND’s nation-leading 89.1 points per game this season. “I don’t know if we’re setting any assist records, but four people over 100 (in the same year) I think is pretty unusual, too.”

Stanford stalking

Connecticut’s typically viewed as Notre Dame’s arch nemesis — and if the Irish win Monday, they’ll see the Huskies again at the Final Four in Tampa, Fla. — but it’s Stanford that’s ended the last two Irish seasons that ended with a loss.

The last postseason game that defending national champion ND has dropped was 76-75 as a No. 1 seed against the second-seeded Cardinal in the 2017 regional final in Lexington, Ky.

The last one the Irish lost before that was 90-84 in a 2016 regional semifinal against Stanford, also in Lexington, with ND as a No. 1 and the Cardinal as just a No. 4.

In the 2017 game — which came a week after Turner was sidelined for over a year — Ogunbowale scored 25 points as a sophomore, but missed a possible game-winning shot, hardly a precursor to the two she’d go on to drain at last spring’s Final Four.

Stanford stormed back from a 16-point, third-quarter deficit for that 2017 win.

“I’d like to spend all my time watching two and three years ago,” Cardinal coach Tara VanDerveer joked Sunday of whether she’ll review video of the last two matchups in preparation for this one, “but that probably won’t help us that much tomorrow. … We have played against them a little bit, but this is a new team for them. We’ve got to get ready for this team.”

For Stanford, only Alanna Smith, who came off the bench to net 15 points, and DiJonai Carrington, who played just eight minutes, remain as active players from the 2017 game.

Besides Ogunbowale, Notre Dame has back Marina Mabrey, who scored 20 points that day, and Young, who added four off the bench as a freshman.

“We run a lot of the same stuff,” Mabrey said Sunday of the Cardinal. “We have a lot of the same tendencies. It’ll be key for us to play really good defense.”

Each team enters on a 12-game winning streak.

After Notre Dame beat Texas A&M, 87-80, in Saturday’s first regional semifinal at Wintrust Arena — the only win in its current streak decided by fewer than 18 points — Stanford overcame ice-cold shooting to down Missouri State, 55-46. That was the sixth single-digit win during the Cardinal’s streak.