Caitlin Clark delivered a masterpiece Monday night in Albany as she led the Iowa women's basketball team to a 94-87 victory over LSU in the Elite Eight, avenging the Hawkeyes' 2023 national championship game loss to the Tigers and punching their proverbial tickets back to the Final Four for a second consecutive year.
The win comes just nearly a year after Clark and Iowa lost in the NCAA tournament national final to LSU 102-85. On Monday, Clark recorded a game-high 41 points and 12 assists while hitting nine three-pointers, one more than the entire LSU team combined.
After the game, Clark tweeted out her reaction to the win guaranteeing her team will return to the Final Four.
“CLEVELAND!!!!!!!!!! FINAL FOUR!!!!! HAWK FANS LETS GOOOOOO,” Clark wrote.
Caitlin Clark's record-breaking senior season at Iowa
Clark has had a historic season and career at Iowa. As a senior, she is leading the nation in points (32.0), assists (9.0), field goals (386), field goal attempts (840), three-point field goals (193), and three-point attempts (508).
On February 15 against Michigan, Clark surpassed Kelsey Plum as the NCAA Division I all-time women's basketball scoring leader. Plum had held the record for almost seven years, having scored 3,527 career points in her four seasons at Washington. Less than two weeks later, Clark became the major women's college basketball scoring leader by passing Lynette Woodard, who scored 3,649 points at Kansas in the late 1970s and early 1980s — when women's basketball was sanctioned by the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.
In early March, Clark scored 35 points against No. 2 Ohio State, and in the process, surpassed “Pistol” Pete Maravich in career points. Maravich, who averaged 44.2 points per game in his three-year career at LSU from 1967 to 1970, is the all-time men's Division I basketball points leader with 3,667.
Caitlin Clark leads Iowa women's basketball back to Final Four
While records have fallen and broken courtesy of Clark this season, she and the Iowa women's basketball team have also been focused on improving on a bitter end to last season. The Hawkeyes lost the aforementioned national final to LSU, which seemed to motivate Iowa throughout the season.
The Hawkeyes won 18 of their first 19 games and, despite close losses to Ohio State and Nebraska, as well as a lopsided road loss at Indiana in February, ultimately remained in the top six of the Associated Press poll the entire season. Iowa finished off the regular season with a win in the rematch against Ohio State before crushing Penn State and Michigan in the first two rounds of the Big Ten tournament.
Clark scored 34 and dropped 12 dimes against Nebraska in the Big Ten tournament championship game as the Hawkeyes defeated the Cornhusker 94-89 in overtime, securing the program's third consecutive conference tournament title.
Iowa rolled to a 91-65 win over Holy Cross to start its 2024 NCAA tournament before running into a stiff test from West Virginia in the round of 32. Clark scored 32 points but struggled from the field (8-22 FG and 5-14 3PT). Fortunately, she and the Hawkeyes enjoyed a comfortable advantage at the free throw line; Clark attempted more than double the number of free throws West Virginia's entire team did, while Iowa shot 30 foul shots, six times WVU's total.
Iowa cruised to a Sweet Sixteen victory over Colorado in a rematch from last season's Sweet Sixteen before another Hawkeyes rematch with LSU on Monday.
In the Final Four, Clark and Iowa will face Paige Bueckers and UConn, who defeated JuJu Watkins and USC on Monday in the Elite Eight.
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