This year’s LA Story is a compelling one

It is the first season since the major realignment that happened as a result of the breakup of the Pac-12, and the first in the post-Caitlin Clark era, where the burgeoning popularity of the game that crested with the Iowa superstar attempts to maintain its staying power.

No two teams are a bigger part of this new era than UCLA and USC, programs that embody what is current about women’s basketball – including big-time player marketability with NIL and the ability to use the transfer portal to lure elite talent and turn your program into a championship caliber team.

LSU may have been first out of that gate in both respects, but No. 1 UCLA and No. 4 USC are becoming models for long-term success in this new way of being.

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There is little question that No. 1 UCLA – which has never reached the Final Four – and No. 4 USC – looking for its first Final Four appearance since 1986 – aren’t merely relevant, but with high-profile wins on their non-conference resumes, have shown they are “for real” when it comes to their status as title contenders.

In a new conference, and with some big measuring stick games to come, the Southern California schools are among the most intriguing teams in the country.

The Bruins have not only never been to a Final Four, but in fact they have reached the Elite Eight just once in the NCAA, in the 2017-18 season. This level of success and recognition is unprecedented. But based on the Bruins’ performance so far, this isn’t the UCLA teams of the past, ones in which abundant individual talent led to high expectations, high hopes and too often, a finish that fell short of both.

UCLA (12-0) has maintained its hold on the No. 1 spot in the national rankings for five weeks. Beating South Carolina at the end of November, ending the Gamecocks’ 43-game win streak should be viewed as a proof point, not an aberration.

With the addition of Oregon State transfer Timea Gardiner, a last year’s addition of Lauren Betts, added to a homegrown cache that includes Kiki Rice, Londynn Jones, Gabriela Jaquez and Angela Dugalic’, coach Cori Close has all of the parts she needs. Her team is deep, versatile and stacked with talent, which has allowed them to stay consistent despite injuries to Betts, Rice, Ducalic’, Gardiner and Jaquez, who have combined to miss nine games so far this season.

“Our talent is our floor,” Close said following the Bruins’ win over Creighton last week at San Francisco’s Chase Center. “I think we’ve proven and the evidence is there of what we can become. But we have not yet arrived.”

Close is focused on her team’s growth on the mental side.

“It is urgent that I improve today, that I make a teammate better today, that I’m different than I was yesterday…Obviously, our roster is really good. But it will be our character that leads us to where we want to go.”

At USC, Lindsay Gottlieb’s perpetual retooling with new faces, both with highly-rated recruits and through the portal – the Trojans have had 39 different players, including 21 transfers since Gottlieb took over in 2021 – has perhaps reached a point of some successful stasis thanks to anchors JuJu Watkins and Rayah Marshall.

USC’s nationally televised stumble against Notre Dame was the price of doing business. Gottlieb and her team have wanted the white hot spotlight, and when they got and and didn’t show up in the way they wanted, it was a valuable, if painful lesson.

And the Trojans applied that lesson at their very next opportunity against Connecticut, gutting out a 72-70 win in Hartford, the first-ever win over the Huskies in program history.

“This is a really significant win for our program,” Gottlieb said immediately after the win over Connecticut. “When we lost to Notre Dame, it would have been really easy to blame people, to fracture, to listen to outside stuff.”

She challenged her team after that game to allow the loss to make them better.

“And it has, in every way.”

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Watkins surely did not commit to USC to make it “almost to a title,” and Kiki Iriafen didn’t transfer from Stanford on a hope and a prayer that Gottlieb could put a championship team together. The addition of Talia von Oelhoffen from Oregon State has given the Trojans a veteran backcourt presence.

The gauntlet of Big Ten play, which both teams will enter later this week, will be telling for both teams.

Will they struggle with unfamiliar matchups or the first season of the exhausting travel we’ve all been warned about? Or will they run roughshod over a group of teams that were probably less happy to see them coming than the networks who shelled out all of that money for their football teams and a foothold in the LA market?

Many of those questions are still to be answered.

What’s not in question, both USC and UCLA both appear to be built for something big, maybe even something worthy of a Hollywood script.