Good vs. Evil? No, it’s Iowa vs. LSU, fiery, high-level teams playing for high stakes

ALBANY, N.Y. — Yeah, yeah, yeah. LSU is the Evil Empire.

The Tigers are the purple meanies who taunted Caitlin Clark and Iowa and showed no remorse during or after their NCAA women’s basketball championship win over the Hawkeyes last year.

Iowa is noble, LSU is ignoble. Dot-dot-dot, dee-dee-dee.

Reality: The Tigers were oozing with respect and appreciation for the Hawkeyes here Sunday morning.

Angel Reese, who was in Clark’s face with the John Cena “You can’t see me” hand gesture late in the title game, has long been on friendly terms with Clark.

In case anyone forgot, Clark quickly dismissed the furor over Reese’s hand-wave as much ado about nothing. Besides, Clark gave the same gesture late in Iowa’s regional-final win over Louisville two games earlier and didn’t catch a sliver of the criticism Reese did.

“People want to run this into a rivalry, and it’s not,” Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder said. “It’s a competition.”

The competition went the Tigers’ way last year in Dallas when they beat Iowa 102-85 for the national championship. They meet again here Monday night for a spot in this week’s Final Four in Cleveland.

Emotions will run hot. Undoubtedly, at some point there will be sharp words exchanged, perhaps some overly physical play. Bluder called it. It’s a competition. It’s high-level for high stakes.

“Oh my gosh, I love Caitlin,” Reese said last October. “We’ve been competing since we were in AAU. It was always fun, always competitive. One day, hopefully, we could even be teammates. She is a great player, shooter, person and teammate.”

Here’s what sensational LSU sophomore guard Flau’jae Johnson said about Clark Sunday:

“She’s an amazing player who’s done some amazing things for women’s basketball.

“Last year I caught Clark in transition and she was near the half-court line. I said ‘She’s not going to shoot it.’ She shot it right in my face. I got my ‘Welcome to the Clark Show’ moment.”

Reese trash-talks. Plenty. Clark does, too. Plenty. Neither apologizes for it, and why should they? When men do it, it’s as much a part of the game as the pick-and-roll.

“I don't think people realize it's not personal,” Reese said. “If I see you walking down the street, it's like, ‘Hey, girl, what's up, let's hang out.’ I think people just take it like we hate each other. Me and Caitlin Clark don't hate each other. I want everybody to understand that. It's just a super-competitive game.”

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Asked if she sees similarities between Reese and Clark, LSU Coach Kim Mulkey practically hollered “Heck, yeah!”

“You've got two very talented players that have brought a lot of attention to our sport. They both trash-talk. They both make their teammates better. They both have their teammates' back. They have both elevated our game to where we have people watching that never watched women's basketball before.

“Yeah, those are tough women.”

Both teams are enjoyable to watch because they play hard, they play beautifully, and they play with passion. If you want to write off LSU players as classless and disrespectful, you’re judging from a living room and missing something.

Johnson is an accomplished rapper as well as a player who has averaged almost 20 points over her last seven games. She answered all the countless questions posed to her in the Tigers’ dressing room Sunday with courtesy and a smile on her face.

“For my music I just try to speak to my experience and speak positivity in life, in motivation,” she said. “I don’t curse in my music. That’s just who I am.”

Bluder spoke for her team, but could just as easily have been talking about LSU’s when she said this Sunday:

“Building confidence in my women — we talk all the time, do not listen to outside sources. They don't know you. They don't know your heart. They don't know who you are as a person.

“To me, it's like we have a very tight circle, and we really just care about the people in the circle and what they think about us and not what the outside voices have opinions about because they don't know us. They really don't know who we are.“

Here’s what we do know: These are two excellent teams playing a very big, very anticipated game Monday night. If you need more than that to stir the pot, the two teams don’t really care.

“You can choose to focus on the people that say bad things about it,” LSU guard Hailey Van Lith said, “but at the end of the day, they're talking online for a reason.

“If they were in this situation — they would never be in that situation to begin with because they're too busy commenting on other people's lives.”

All that said, how about this game!

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