LOS ANGELES – When No. 9 Princeton women’s basketball (26-3) takes on No. 8 Oklahoma State (23-9) in a NCAA Tournament Round of 64 matchup on Saturday afternoon at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, they’ll be looking at a mirror image of themselves.
And not just because the Cowgirls also wear orange and black.
Both teams are near look-alikes in how they are configured and play the game.
“When you size up our rosters, I think we’re dang near identical,” quipped Oklahoma State coach Jacie Hoyt at Friday’s pregame press conference.
The Tigers’ trademark all season has been balanced scoring, with all five starters averaging double-digit scoring per game. Ditto for Oklahoma State, which also has five players averaging double digits.
And both teams rank among the nation’s highest in adjusted offensive efficiency, with the Cowgirls coming in at No. 23 in the Torvik rankings while Princeton slots in at 30th.
But the resemblance doesn’t end there.
Both head coaches, Carla Berube for No. 23 Princeton and Hoyt for the unranked Cowgirls, play a very short bench, typically rotating in only six or seven players for meaningful minutes.
And both teams are undersized with no starter taller than 6-foot-1.
“You could say that [Princeton is] a little bit undersized in the post,” said Hoyt. “But that’s been our narrative all season long.”
Perhaps the most important similarity is that both squads are led by a strong corps of upperclassmen who are hungry for success in the NCAA Tournament after falling short in hard-fought, early-round March Madness matchups last year.
The Cowgirls bowed to South Dakota State, 74-68, in a rare first round upset last year, while Princeton surrendered a 15-point lead in a 68-63 loss to Iowa State in the First Four of last year’s March Madness.
“I think we’re really hungry,” said Oklahoma State senior guard Micah Gray at Friday’s team press conference. “We understand that we don’t want to be first-rounders again. That just gives us more motivation.”
Put it all together, and what you get is a very evenly matched contest that is likely to come down to a final shot or play.
Here are three keys to Princeton’s second matchup against a Big XII opponent in the past three Big Dances:
1. Two matchups will likely have an outsized impact on the game.
In addition to the general similarities between these two teams, some of the key matchups involve similar players as well.
Case in point: Fadima Tall of Princeton versus Stailee Heard of Oklahoma State. Both of these junior superstars tend to be the bellwethers for their teams.
Tall (13.2 points, 7.4 rebounds, 2.1 assists per game) is coming off an Ivy League Tournament Most Outstanding Player award after leading the Tigers past Harvard in the Ivy League championship game last weekend with 20 points and seven rebounds.
A two-time Second Team All-Ivy forward, Tall does it all for the Tigers by scoring from all levels, rebounding, defending, and leading her team emotionally, especially in crunch time. Tall is also Princeton’s best free-throw shooter, with an 83.3% success rate from the charity stripe.
Heard plays a similar role for the Cowgirls.
Like Tall, Heard is a two-time all-conference player having earned First Team All-Big 12 honors last season as a sophomore and Second-Team honors this season in her junior campaign. The 5-foot-11 guard from Sapulpa, Okla. averages 12.3 points, 5.8 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game. Like Tall, Heard converts better than 83% of her free throw attempts.
Heard plays the point guard role more often than Tall this season, but her overall impact on the game in terms of scoring, assisting, rebounding, defending, and on-court leadership, is similar to Tall’s.
“Heard is tough,” Berube said at Princeton’s Friday press conference. “She’s strong, she can really spread the floor because she can shoot the three well and then she can bully you inside. She finishes well at the rim. She also distributes it well. Yeah, she’s tough.”
Another key matchup to keep an eye on involves each team’s leading scorer and and highest impact senior: Madison St. Rose for Princeton and Gray for Oklahoma State.
St. Rose has enjoyed a triumphant return in her senior campaign after missing nearly all of last season due to injury.
The playmaking guard from Old Bridge, N.J., tallied a team high 15.7 points per game this season and was voted First-Team All Ivy for the first time in her career.
Gray’s path to success has been different from St. Rose’s, but she too has ended up playing in her home state after spending her first two years at Texas Southern and Seton Hall before transferring to Stillwater for the 2024-25 season.
Like St. Rose, Gray leads her team in scoring with 13.8 points per game. The 5-foot-8 shooting guard from Oklahoma City shoots nearly 35% from three and was recently named a finalist to the WBCA All-America team.
“We have seen Micah Gray before because she played at Seton Hall so we know what she can do from beyond the arc,” commented Berube. “So there’s a familiarity there with her and, yeah, I mean, you can’t give her any space.”
We won’t know until tip-off whether these impact players for both teams will be guarding each other, but how these matchups unfold on Saturday should play a large role in determining the outcome of the game.
If Tall outplays Heard and St. Rose outscores Gray, I like Princeton’s chances to advance to the Round of 32.
2. Can Princeton protect the defensive glass?
As similar as these teams appear on paper, they diverge to a degree when it comes to rebounding and generating second chances.
Oklahoma State excels at grabbing offensive boards, ranking 57th in the country in offensive rebounding percentage according to Bart Torvik.
“I mean, honestly, I feel like it’s a lost [art] in women’s basketball,” explained Heard on Friday. “You don’t see very many teams offensive rebounding or trying to go get second-chance opportunities. I feel like that messes up the [other team’s] defense, their transition. They think if they can’t get a rebound, then they can’t run in transition. I feel like coach preaches a lot about hitting the glass very hard and trying to give ourselves second-chance opportunities.”
Princeton has been accommodating to teams with a nose for corralling second chances. The Tigers rank 186th in defensive rebounding, obliging their opponents 36.6% of the time on the defensive glass.
In the few games the Tigers have dropped this season, they were typically out-rebounded decisively. For example, in Princeton’s worst loss of the season, a 70-56 setback at Columbia, the Tigers were out muscled on the boards, 43-28, and surrendered 23 second-chance points to the Lions on 21 offensive rebounds.
“We need to find bodies,” Berube said when asked on Friday how her Tigers can hold the Cowgirls off the glass. “We need to push back, we need to pursue. Yes, you can make contact, but you’ve really got to get after the rebound and those loose balls and so [that is] a huge, huge emphasis. We’ve been talking about it a lot, because that’s a controllable . . . We’ve got to really do a great job of all five pursuing the ball.”
If Princeton can limit OSU’s second chances to well-below the 36% threshold, the Tigers should be able to control tomorrow’s contest.
On the other hand, if the Tigers find themselves watching the ball instead of rallying to it, as they have at times this season, Oklahoma State has the firepower to punish Princeton by converting second chances into points.
3. The game likely will come down to a final shot or a final play. Guess who that favors?
Everything about this game suggests it’s going to come down to a final possession.
Given Princeton’s penchant for pulling out close contests this season, a nail-biting finish should favor the Tigers.
Berube’s club has come from behind eight times to win in the fourth quarter this season, using a pair of buzzer-beaters by Ashley Chea to beat Harvard at Princeton and again to get into overtime before prevailing at George Mason.
Last week, after Harvard used a late push to overcome a 12-point deficit and knot the score in the final minutes of the Ivy League Tournament championship game, the Tigers focused like a laser beam and closed out the game on a 12-2 run to win their sixth Ivy Madness title.
“I think with these really close fourth-quarter games what it taught us is that if we stick together, stay poised and go back to what we know, I feel like that is how we pull out a lot of games,” St. Rose said at Princeton’s Friday presser. “When clutch time comes around, I feel like that’s when we’re really focused on getting each other the ball, making sure we set each other up for success and winning those 50/50 balls.”
A final factor favoring the Tigers is familiarity.
Not only are three Tigers from the Los Angeles area — Chea, Skye Belker and Emily Eadie — two seasons ago, Princeton traveled west to play UCLA at Pauley Pavilion during the nonconference part of the season. Facing the No. 3 ranked team in the nation, the Tigers executed to near perfection and led by one with under a minute to play before falling to the Bruins, 77-74.
“I do feel like we are familiar with this place, even though it was just one game,” St. Rose said at Friday’s press conference. “But we’re just super-excited to know that we have a really big game coming up, and I’m just happy to play with a good group of girls.”
If the game comes down to a final play to win the game, look for the Tigers, who by all accounts have at least one of their nine lives remaining, to gut out the victory.
