SACRAMENTO — Gianna Kneepkens’ long ponytail swished as she swiftly stepped to the top of the key. She released the shot, knowing she was in the right place.
“Anyone that’s open, we think it’s going in every single time,” Kneepkens said.
The prediction prevailed, and UCLA’s second 3-pointer of the game polished off a 9-0 scoring run in the third quarter that helped the Bruins adjust their course and remain steady to beat Duke, 70-58, earning a return trip to the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four.
The top-seeded Bruins (35-1) will face the winner of Monday’s game between top-seeded Texas and second-seeded Michigan in a national semifinal next week on Friday in Phoenix, with unbeaten defending champion Connecticut on the other side of the Final Four bracket. UCLA is two wins away from the program’s first NCAA title.
The experience of having multiple consecutive deep tournament runs and a senior-heavy team had prepared UCLA to make the adjustments needed after a low-scoring, high-turnover first half. The Bruins outscored the third-seeded Blue Devils 39-19 after halftime.
“We’ve been in really tough moments,” senior guard Kiki Rice said. “We’ve been in games where we’ve been down, and we had to make a comeback in the second half, so I just think we had a very calm nature about us. We knew we needed to make adjustments, so we had trust and belief that we would be able to do that.”
Lauren Betts scored a game-high 23 points on 9-for-14 shooting while pulling down 10 rebounds. Angela Dugalić scored 15 points off the bench to go with six rebounds and had four assists. Both were named to the Sacramento Regional 2 All-Tournament team.
For the second straight game, UCLA struggled to hit 3-pointers and went 0 for 4 from long range in the first half. Kneepkens, the team’s 3-point threat, only attempted one shot from afar in the half as the Bruins struggled to open up the floor against a Duke squad (27-9) that holds teams to 37.2% shooting.
The 17 points that UCLA scored in the first quarter were the fewest in any opening quarter of the tournament so far. The Bruins were feeding the ball to Betts, a 6-foot-7 center, and the Blue Devils’ answer was to collapse their defense on anyone who got the ball in the paint.
Adding to the Bruins’ struggles, they turned the ball over 12 times in the half.
Duglić, who surpassed 1,000 career points in the previous round against Minnesota, came in midway through the opening quarter to add height and potential mismatches. She went on to make 3 of 5 shots for six points in the first half.
It wasn’t enough to counteract Duke’s execution on both offense and defense.
Rice flashed her ball-handling skills with a turnaround dribble and Euro step layup to cut Duke’s lead to 25-23, but the ACC champions extended their lead roughly 10 points and held on to that advantage for most of the second quarter by dominating the mid-range with efficient shooting.
“What I said to the team in the locker room after that was just like, hey, even now, even this time, we can’t change,” head coach Cori Close said. “What does this teach us? What do we learn from it? How do we take the experience of that first half and help us be better prepared going into the Final Four and to our next opportunity at 1-0?”
Taina Mair put up 12 points and Riley Nelson had 11 points by halftime and the team as a whole was making more shot attempts than UCLA, finishing at 53.1% from the field at the break.
Gabriela Jaquez made UCLA’s first 3-pointer of the game at the start of the third quarter, and Betts followed up with two layups on assists from Charlisse Leger-Walker.
Leger-Walker – the trigger to the Bruins’ shooting – had six assists in the game and continuously facilitated scoring opportunities.
“She knows when to get buckets herself, and she knows where everyone is and when they need to get it and at what time,” Kneepkens said of Leger-Walker. “It’s so fun playing with her because the defense is thrown off because she thinks like two plays ahead.”
It was Kneepkens, however, who changed the course of the game with her 3-point shot.
She threw down her arms in celebration as UCLA completed a 9-0 scoring run while simultaneously frustrating Duke’s offense. The Blue Devils had a stretch of 0-for-6 shooting late in the quarter and finished the frame with just eight points.
Dugalić’s grittiness held the team together in key moments down the stretch. She grabbed a loose ball after a missed 3-pointer by Rice for a buzzer-beating layup to close out the third, and made a tough layup early in the fourth. She made the ensuing free throw to give UCLA a 56-47 lead.
With three minutes left in the game, she hooked a layup as the shot clock expired to pull the Bruins ahead 65-56 and give her team enough cushion to finish out the win.
“I think this year we have the approach of, this is a job,” Dugalić said. “This is a business trip, at the end of the day. And we have a job to do. And that’s to win a national championship.”
UCLA, the Big Ten champion, has now beaten Duke, the ACC champion, twice this season.
The Bruins earned an 89-59 Thanksgiving Day win over the Blue Devils on the second day of the 2025 Players Era Women’s Championship in Las Vegas. They were playing without Lauren Betts, who missed the game due to injury.
In the NCAA Tournament, UCLA had beaten California Baptist, Oklahoma State and Minnesota to reach the Elite Eight. Each win came by 19 points or more.
Duke was playing in its second consecutive Elite Eight appearance and was led by Kara Lawson, who is also the USA Women’s Basketball National Team coach.
