INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — On Day 2 of the Big Ten women’s basketball tournament, the sides that battled for the final top-four, double-bye spot all had an opportunity to make the best of their single byes. In total, five teams played their first tournament games.
Here are key storylines from an action-packed Day 2 in Indianapolis.
Elle Ladine’s bounceback performance and Jazzy Davidson’s injury
Last season, No. 8 seeded Washington Huskies’ guard Elle Ladine took the Big Ten by storm. The then-junior averaged a career high 19.2 points per game in conference play, an increase of seven points per game on her way to a spot on the conference’s Second Team All-Big Ten.
This season, Ladine missed five of the Huskies’ 12 nonconference games due to injury and, when she did come back, the effectiveness was not there like the 2024-25 campaign. In December, when Washington traveled to California to face the USC Trojans, Ladine went 0-for-10 from the field and scored no points in the 59-50 Trojan victory.
Fast forward to Thursday and Ladine did not look like her last season form — she looked better. Ladine compiled a season-high 25 points, 6 rebounds and 4 assists in the Huskies’ 76-64 victory over the No. 9 USC Trojans.
“It’s March, and we’re here to survive and win and keep winning,” Ladine told reporters. “When I have that mindset of just playing to win and [don’t] focus on other outcomes or anything like that — and also having these guys instilling confidence in need — it just helped me play a lot freer today.”
Ladine missed her first two shots of the game, both from beyond the arc, and then rattled off 10 of her next 11 shots. The senior went 3-for-6 from 3-point range and 7-for-7 from inside the arc, a change from the Ladine of last year when she averaged 2.3 3-point makes per game.
On Thursday, Ladine went to the basket and around the USC defense and made the play of the game at the end of the first half. With 0.4 seconds left on the clock, Ladine ran around her teammates’ screens to catch and shoot in one fluid motion from a foot inside the free throw line.
“[Ladine]’s been such an incredible servant leader this year, and I think there’s no [one] more happy for her than her team, because she’s incredibly driven to be great and into making people around her great,” head coach Tina Langley told reporters. “And you just saw it.”
Early on, the matchup against Big Ten Freshman of the Year Jazzy Davidson and the Trojans was sloppy for both sides. Both entered the day ready to play their first games of the tournament and — in the opening quarter, while both sides knocked off rust — a moment between Davidson and Washington guard Avery Howell changed the game.
With 4:52 remaining in the first quarter, both battled for a loose ball. Howell made a move to get Davidson away from the ball and appeared to hurt the guard’s right shoulder. Referees found no need to upgrade the foul to a flagrant after a review, but when Davidson returned just over a minute of game time later, but she was not the same.
Davidson’s shot was off and early into her return, after a missed free throw, she held her arm for a moment, favoring that side. The freshman still played 29 minutes but went 2-for-13 from the field with eight points, only the second time she scored so few points this season. However, in the fourth quarter, after three minutes, Davidson went to the bench with Washington up 22 points. Reporter Marisa Ingemi posted later on social media that Davidson will have an MRI on Friday.
Washington won the right to face the UCLA Bruins in the noon EST tip on Friday. The Bruins defeated the Huskies 82-67 on Feb. 19 in Los Angeles.
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Ohio State peaking at the right time?
The Big Ten announced its postseason honors for the 2025-26 season, with predictable results. UCLA and its 18-0 conference record cleaned up nearly every individual award, minus Davidson’s Freshman of the Year win. Center Lauren Betts especially stood out as winner of both the Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year awards.
Betts did not win unanimously, which means some votes might have gone to Ohio State guard Kennedy Cambridge. This season, the redshirt junior notched 120 steals and a defensive rating of 79.4 average points allowed in every 100 possessions.
“I found out right before practice and I walked into the locker room, one person I saw was Ava [Watson], and immediately, she thought something was wrong with me, and so obviously I was sad.” Kennedy Cambridge told reporters. “I think I’m sad for about three minutes, and I think everybody came in at the same time and told me that I was their Defensive Player of the Year.”
It was a goal for the guard to win the award this season and follow it up with a National Defensive Player of the Year award, which she is on the latest Naismith watchlist.
Thursday was the Buckeyes’ first game since that perceived snub, and the No. 13 Indiana Hoosiers were on the wrong side of the matchup. After a program record 20-point comeback on Wednesday against the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the Hoosiers went up 12-6 a little over halfway through the first quarter before Ohio State ran away with the game.
Over the next 33:55 of the game, the Buckeyes outscored the Hoosiers 77-47 and part of that surge came from defensive pressure. Ohio State forced Indiana into 15 turnovers, which the Buckeyes converted into 21 points. Indiana guard Shay Ciezki, who averaged 23.2 points per game before Wednesday, scored 12 points on 6-for-20 shooting.
Kennedy Cambridge only had one steal, below her Big Ten leading 4.0 steals per game, but the guard added 14 points with two shots from beyond the arc and six rebounds. All of that on top of the group defense played by the Buckeye guards against the likes of Ciezki and Lenee Beaumont, who scored only six points.
The Buckeyes had 17 more shots than the Hoosiers too thanks to a conference-season high 19 offensive rebounds for Ohio State. With limited chances to shoot, Indiana converted only 33.3% of its shots for a complete Buckeyes victory .
Look deeper into the recent play of McGuff’s side and they now have a near upset of the Michigan Wolverines, an 18-point win over the Michigan State Spartans (in East Lansing) and now a 24-point tournament opening victory. Are the Buckeyes hitting their peak at the right time?
“I think we’re still far from it,” Kennedy Cambridge said. “I think that what we’re going to see in this postseason is going to be something that no one’s seen before. I think the heart and the grit is really going to come now.”
Young Illinois’ performance avoids repeat disappointment
The No. 10 Illinois Fighting Illini have been a mixed bag during the a campaign that followed the graduation of five players from head coach Shauna Green’s program. Turnover like that could take down even the strongest of ships, and the Illinois season looked, at times, like a game of sink or float. Illinois won its first ranked game of the season against the Maryland Terrapins but then lost its next five against Associated Press top-25 opponents.
While wins came against teams below them in the Big Ten standings, youthful decision making hampered the Illini when five of their nine conference losses ended in a loss by two possessions or less. Winning tight games was not a strength. So, when the No. 7 Michigan Spartans faced Illinois in the Big Ten Tournament’s third game of the day, the pressure of past results and the current stakes weighed heavily. Illinois held that weight, sometimes almost fell to it, but had an upperclassmen-like performance in a 71-69 victory.
On Wednesday, Illinois played a close game against the Wisconsin Badgers before pulling away late, and against the Spartans it was the opposite. Michigan State gave up four turnovers to start the game as Michigan State went ahead six points. Illinois had the disadvantage of playing a day prior, an especially tough thing to overcome against a team with the pace of Michigan State.
Instead of getting lost in it, Illinois slowed the game down, and nearly everyone on the roster played their part.
Freshman forward Cearah Parchment scored the first eight points for Illinois, which kept the game from getting out of hand early. Parchment had 15 points in the first half and five from the free throw line as the Spartans tried to adjust and make things difficult on the freshman.
Parchment wouldn’t score again, but it didn’t matter because the guards got into the fold. Freshman guard Destiny Jackson had 14 points, 6 rebounds and 5 assists, although she did account for seven of the Illini’s 17 turnovers. Even so, the early foul trouble forced by aggressive Illinois interior play sent All-Big Ten forward Grace VanSlooten to the bench to avoid further foul trouble. Once the Spartans’ best interior defender was sidelined, Jackson and Jasmine Brown-Hagger took their smaller frames into the lane with pace to combine for 19 second half points. In total, Illinois had five players score between 11 and 15 points.
“I think that’s just the type of team we are,” Parchment told reporters. “If you take away one person, we have so many other people that can just go off. So I think that really showcased tonight.”
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With eight minutes remaining, the Illini built up their biggest lead of the game at nine points, but head coach Robyn Fralick’s Spartans did not go away easily. Rewind to Feb. 26, in Iowa City, and the Illini had a six-point lead with just under eight minutes remaining. Iowa came back to win 82-78. Coach Green used the similarities to the Illini’s advantage.
“I’m like ‘We’re winning this game. We’re learning from our mistakes in Iowa, and we’re going to come out, and we’re going to execute this last six minutes,’” Green said, but Michigan State did not make it easy. Even so, Illinois played a “bend, don’t break” defense, and had a little luck.
Guard Kennedy Blair, scored eight of her game-high 30 points and three assists in the last quarter and once VanSlooten returned from the bench, Illinois struggled to find offense. With a chance to tie the game under the basket, VanSlooten missed a contested layup. Then, with 4.5 seconds left, Blair had the ball and a shot at winning, but passed the ball out of bounds.
When the whistle blew, the Illini huddled up, screamed and celebrated a game that they lost many times this season. This time, Illinois was on the winning side when it counted more.
Cardiac Ducks set for rematch against Michigan
If the end of Illinois’ win over Michigan State was a coincidence, the final game of Day 2 was downright eerie in the No. 11 Oregon Ducks’ 73-68 win over the No. 6 Maryland Terrapins.
A matchup between the teams from opposite coasts featured a balance of outlier performances for stars on both sides and a back-and-forth worthy of a Quad 1 game. At halftime, Oregon sophomore guard Katie Fiso had no points. For Maryland, sharpshooting senior guard Yarden Garzon had only three points in a tightly contested 32-31 advantage for the Terrapins.
Out of halftime, Fiso responded with 10 of the Ducks’ first 14 points of the quarter, a run that gave Oregon the lead until Maryland guard Oluchi Okananwa picked the team up and put them on her shoulders, which was not the first or last time she did just that in the tournament nightcap. The two sides traded leads until Maryland entered the fourth quarter up five points.
It looked like head coach Brenda Frese’s side would withstand the Ducks, and then the fourth quarter happened.
Back on Jan. 31, in College Park, the Terrapins had a lead headed into the fourth quarter too. What followed was a 24-11 Oregon run in the final 10 minutes to come away with a seven-point victory. Thursday night it was a 22-11 Oregon run in the final 10 minutes to secure the victory.
“Sadly, it felt kind of like deja vu,” Frese told reporters. “Their big two [Fiso and Ehis Etute], took over in the second half, obviously, as you saw … just helping off the wrong players, some basic rules defensively that we have, but, I mean, that’s pressure, right?”
For all of the scoring for Fiso in the third, the Seattle native dished out assists in the last 10 minutes, four to be exact, a team high for the final period. The first three went to Oregon forward Ehis Etute, who scored 11 of her 20 points in the fourth quarter, six credited to Fiso on assists. The final one went to sophomore guard and first year Duck Avary Cain.
The former Bruin averaged 3.7 points before Thursday, and she nearly matched it with the shot that put the game away for Oregon. Up two points with seconds left on the clock, Fiso drew in the defense, passed out to Cain who stood behind the arc and hit her third three-point shot of the night on 3-for-3 shooting.
“[Cain]’s a dog. You know, she wants to win, she wants to compete,” Fiso told reporters. “It’s a just testament to her work, her work ethic, she puts in on and off the court, you know, trying to be better for this team. So I’m just proud of her. The sky’s the limit for her.”
That shot came at a time when Frese and the Terps had three timeouts remaining. Instead of calling it to regroup, the former national championship-winning coach trusted her team to make a stop on defense, but it never came.
Now for the Ducks, its a rematch against the Michigan Wolverines. Oregon head coach Kelly Graves might have found a secret to his team’s performance — sleeping in and skipping the team’s scheduled 9 a.m. shootaround.
“You know what? Sleep [is] always a good plan,” Graves joked with reporters after he was asked if 11 a.m. wake up means he should do away with shootarounds altogether.
That might not come to fruition, but if the Ducks can defeat the Wolverines, maybe the shootaround superstition allows Oregon to comes out on the right side of a game in the Big Ten Tournament.
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