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PARIS — The last time most of the basketball world saw Hailey Van Lith, she was at the wrong end of a Caitlin Clark onslaught.
TV cameras caught Van Lith shrugging her shoulders after one of Clark’s nine 3-pointers in NCAA tournament game in March, a tacit admission from the LSU guard that she was powerless to slow down Iowa’s incandescent star.
The image of Van Lith’s shrug spread across social media before she even had an opportunity to check her phone after the game. A player who helped popularize women’s college basketball alongside the likes of Caitlin, Angel, Paige and Cameron suddenly became the Internet’s favorite “welp” meme.
Only four months later, Van Lith arrives at the Paris Olympics with a chance to reshape the perception of her. The women’s 3×3 tournament is a platform for her to put a difficult season at LSU behind her, remind critics of what she can bring to a team and build momentum heading into her final collegiate season at TCU.
In her Olympic debut on Tuesday, Van Lith was the lone bright spot in a mistake-filled 17-13 U.S. loss to underdog Germany. She scored a team-high six points on 5-for-9 shooting. She assisted on a pair of layups. And she did it all despite the 95-degree Paris heat and a cough and runny nose that has lingered since the rain-soaked Opening Ceremony.
“I don’t think I’ve ever drank so much water in my life,” Van Lith said. “Or like the liquid IVs — I’ve had like five today.”
Van Lith thought she was creating a women’s college basketball super team last year when she transferred to reigning national champion LSU to team up with Angel Reese, Flau’jae Johnson and the rest of the talent-laden Tigers. Instead she struggled to recapture the swagger that she played with at Louisville when she averaged 19.7 points per game as a sophomore and led the Cardinals to a Final Four.
There were times when Van Lith looked uncomfortable transitioning from scoring guard to point guard and playing a supporting role after years as the offensive focal point. It also didn’t help that Van Lith’s struggles played out amid intense media scrutiny associated with joining the preseason No. 1 team in the country.
The most common sentiment about Van Lith is that she just needs to get back to the Van Lith of old to be successful. Her 3×3 teammates say that’s selling her short. In practice, Rhyne Howard said she sees “a new Hailey,” a fearless competitor who can still hit tough shots but now also makes better decisions with and without the ball in her hands.
“We know that she can score,” Howard said. “But making a pass that earlier in her career would have been hard to make, she’s making that with ease now.”
In a separate conversation about five minutes later, fellow American 3×3 player Cierra Burdick made a similar observation about Van Lith’s growth making the right offensive reads.
“She’s always been a player that can hit tough shots, that can provide an offensive spark, but I think her ability to facilitate and her passing skills have really improved,” Burdick said. “She’s not necessarily taking tough shots over two players. If there’s an open man, she’s finding her. That just makes her more lethal as an offensive threat.”
The U.S. will need Van Lith to continue to provide an offensive spark given the issues exposed in the Germany game.
The four players on the U.S. team have only practiced together for two weeks because of an array of injuries. That showed Tuesday night when the Americans blew ball-screen coverages, missed box-outs and became stagnant and 1-on-1-oriented on offense.
The less talented but more team-oriented Germans played faster and fought harder for loose balls for most of the game, building an 11-8 lead and then steadying themselves after the U.S. responded with three straight points. Sharpshooter Marie Reichert all but clinched the German victory in the final minute when she was left wide open in the corner and buried a shot from behind the arc to increase her team’s lead to 16-12.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. I didn’t think it was going to be that ugly,” Burdick, the U.S. team’s most veteran 3×3 player, said. “We’re the most inexperienced team here. We’ve got a lot of skill, a lot of talent, but that doesn’t win 3×3 games. That was a prime example today.”
The U.S. team was supposed to feature Cameron Brink, the No. 2 pick in this year’s WNBA Draft, until she tore her ACL last month. Replacement Dearica Hamby hadn’t played 3×3 before, let alone built a rapport with Van Lith, Burdock and fellow American player Rhyne Howard.
Overcoming the loss of Brink would have been easier for the U.S. had Howard not suffered an ankle injury in June that sidelined her for nearly a month of WNBA games. Even Tuesday, she did not appear to be as quick or aggressive as she would normally be.
Van Lith has three reasons why the U.S. doesn’t need to panic after opening with a surprising loss.
The first is that she and Burdick have been in this position before. They lost their opener at the 2023 women’s 3×3 World Cup before storming back to win the next seven games and claim gold.
The second is that it’s “not a one-game tournament.” There are still six games left for the U.S. in pool play before the bracket portion of the competition. The top two teams in the eight-team pool qualify to the semifinals and the next four teams advance to the play-in games.
The third is that Van Lith anticipates the U.S.’s chemistry issues improving as the tournament goes along.
“If we went back to the hotel room and didn’t see each other, I wouldn’t expect us to get better,” Van Lith said. “But we eat every meal together. We spend every off minute in a room playing card games or talking or going to the Olympic Village together. So we’re getting closer every day.”
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