PORTLAND, Ore. — Sabrina Ionescu has a look in her eye when she’s on the court. You see it when she defends, when she dribbles and when she scrambles for a loose ball and ends up diving into the scorers’ table.
She’s honed in.
“I’ve never met a player like her,” Oregon guard Morgan Yaeger said. “I would compare her to like Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan when they get in the zone completely, 100 percent locked in. They don’t stop till they win.”
Oregon women’s basketball — maybe all of women’s college basketball — may never see a player like Ionescu again. She grabs national attention and national respect, as well as 18 career triple-doubles, setting herself apart from any player to come before her.
“If she was a baseball player, you’d call her a five-tool player,” Mississippi State head coach Vic Schaefer said. “I figured it out, I think she’s an eight-tool player in women’s basketball. She scores at all three levels. She rebounds. She assists. She’s your hustle player. She’s smart. You can throw classy and elegance in on top of it. I mean, that’s how good that kid is.”
Schaefer and the Bulldogs will get their fourth look at her, and second of this season, in Sunday’s Elite Eight.
So just how do you stop an “eight-tool” player?
When she drives?
“She’s just such a good passer and such a good ball handler that it’s really hard for me because I’m a little bigger all around,” Oregon teammate Ruthy Hebard said. “It’s really hard if you take something away, she’s going to have a counter.”
When she’s outside?
“She’s running off screens,” said South Dakota State’s Madison Guebert, who guarded Ionescu in the Sweet 16. “She’s coming off handoffs, ball screens, down screens, all kinds of screens. Yeah, it’s tough because she’s always constantly — she moves so well without the ball. They’re always looking for her.
“Yeah, she just is constantly moving so it’s tough to defend her.”
Ionescu is clearly special. Her intensity, her hatred of losing and her confidence separates her from others.
She sets records just for fun. In Oregon’s second-round win against Indiana, Ionescu collected four rebounds in the final eight minutes, and even joked that she purposely missed a shot for the final rebound to complete her latest triple-double.
“We were winning that game, that’s all that really mattered,” she said. “I was just going to end up breaking my own record, so I could do that any time.”
Whether or not Ionescu will leave for the WNBA after this season, whether or not she will finally get to the Final Four, she has left a lasting legacy.
“She’s cut from a different cloth, I’ll tell you that,” Oregon assistant coach Jodie Berry said. “She competes, that’s the thing that separates her from other competitors is her drive. Her competitiveness and her focus, there’s no kind of getting her off her game in that way.
“She’s really focused and driven and she’s in a league of her own.”
Follow Shawn Medow on Twitter @ShawnMedow
