Can Notre Dame’s Olivia Miles go from injury to the WNBA’s No 1 draft pick?
After bouncing back remarkably from a major knee injury, the Fighting Irish point guard could overtake UConn’s Paige Bueckers in AprilThere aren’t a lot of people who can tell you what it feels like to enter college knowing professional teams already see you as a potential No 1 draft pick four years down the road,There are even fewer who can share how they prepared to hit a college court as an early enrollee, starting on a team with players three to four years older than them,There are fewer still who had all that under their belts and then suffered a season-ending (and potentially career-ending) injury a year later – and who bounced back in such a tremendous way,Notre Dame point guard Olivia Miles is pretty special,Despite the fact that she may overtake Paige Bueckers as this year’s No 1 pick in the WNBA draft, the 22-year-old is still low-key.
She’s not a household name and it’s not apparent she wants to be, but if you follow women’s college basketball, she’s inescapable.Everything was going Miles’ way until she suffered a major knee injury in February 2023.She had committed to Notre Dame as the No 8-ranked player in the 2021 recruiting class, and even enrolled early, beginning her first basketball season soon after her 18th birthday.As the team’s starting point guard, she averaged 13.7 points, 5.
7 rebounds and 7.2 assists; and became the second freshman in the school’s history to post a double-double.Her sophomore season started out powerfully.Before her injury, she averaged 14.3 points, 7.
3 rebounds and 6.9 assists per game; after it, she was named the All-ACC first team.Suddenly she was sidelined for the foreseeable future with a torn ACL, forced to endure painful surgeries as Hannah Hidalgo stepped into her spot and began to dominate.Miles wasn’t back on the court until November 2024, but instead of ceding control to Hidalgo, the pair put the team first and have since built one of the most dominant backcourts in college hoops today.Miles is known for her elite passing – she’s drawn comparisons to Portugal’s Ticha Penicherio, who played in the WNBA for the Sacramento Monarchs – and she’s at her most fluid as a basketball player when she has the room to think ahead and map out several scenarios, the Doctor Strange of women’s basketball.
But to understand Miles’ game, it’s helpful to go back to her freshman year at Blair Academy in New Jersey,Her coach, Quint Clarke, says he knew Miles was special when he first saw her play as an eighth grader, but “after four or five practices, it was clear she was something unique”,Clarke adds: “I had never seen a player with her style, flair, or creativity,Everyone who walked into our gym would be drawn to her game, and she quickly became a fan favorite,”He also offers insight into how Miles plays the way she does now for Notre Dame: with plenty of intention.
“All that crazy stuff she does in games, she practices that,” Clark explains.“She imagines it and has options mapped out in her head … Good players react to the game; great players anticipate the game, but Olivia was the only player I’ve ever coached who would manipulate the game.Her ability to read the game was almost supernatural, and she frequently made plays in practice that had the rest of us laughing in amazement.”The style of play is akin to that of Luka Dončić says international basketball trainer Tremaine Dalton.“She manipulates the game in her own way; she can change pace, she can pass, she can score.
Olivia can see the floor in a way that’s different.Other players that are trying to anticipate what she wants to do, but she’s already ahead of them.”At this point in the collegiate season, there are three things most athletes in Miles’ position are focusing on: the next game they’ll play, how the season is going as a whole, and the looming NCAA Tournament.To be preoccupied with the WNBA draft and her rank would be foolish and a distraction, but to pretend that it’s not right there in front of her face would be dishonest.It’s a scenario that other top draft picks have had to contend with.
Alexis Hornbuckle, who was drafted out of Tennessee by the Detroit Shock in 2008 as the fourth overall pick, remembers the feeling,Hornbuckle was drafted along with her teammate, Candace Parker, who went first overall,“For us, especially for Candace and I, we were still focused on one thing: a national championship,” she says of the months leading up to the draft,“Yes, we were excited, but we had unfinished business,So being able to stay focused on the task at hand was our main focus, and that’s likely true for Olivia and the other young ladies being drafted this year.
”Then-Tennessee coach Pat Summit was also instrumental in keeping her focused.“You don’t believe the hype until you finish what you said you’d do,” Hornbuckle adds.Miles, she says, “seems to be very focused on what she wants and is willing to work hard to ge tit, and I think she understands the talent and gifts that God blessed her with.”Angel McCoughtry, who was drafted as the first overall pick in the 2009 draft by the Atlanta Dream, says there’s a lot happening before and during the draft.First and foremost, at this point, Miles is likely focused on the regular season, but the draft is dancing in the periphery.
Hearing your name called at the draft is rewarding, she says, because “it shows all your hard work, sweat, and tears pays off.”Off the court, Miles is the exact person she seems to be, Clarke says.“The joy she gets from her teammate’s success – that is genuine,” he says.“The happiest I ever saw her in a game was when our manager got in once and hit a three.” It’s that spirit, that empathy, combined with her prodigious skill that makes Miles such an intense threat on the court and a fascinating prospect for the WNBA.
Whether or not Miles snatches Bueckers’ presumed spot at the top of the draft remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: basketball fans had better get used to hearing her name,
Caroline Lucas: ‘I can’t imagine my parents ever voted Green, but they became less antagonistic’
The former Green MP on patriotism, protest and and why Labour is much less ambitious than its votersIt’s tempting to think of Caroline Lucas as a kind of spirit of place in Brighton. She has arrived first at Food for Friends, the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the city, and there is something almost mythical in seeing the pioneering Green MP in its window seat, facing the Lanes, framed by trailing foliage. She has been coming here for as long as she can remember, she says – the restaurant opened in 1981 and used to have folk queuing around the block. She recommends the blueberry and ginger “nojito”, orders the Thai noodle salad and crispy tofu, and half apologises for still being “a vegetarian on the road to veganism” without quite yet arriving at that destination.It’s nine months since Lucas stepped down after 14 years in parliament as her party’s first and, in that time, only MP
Notes on chocolate: make way for a new favourite
Last year a reader called Olivia got in touch to ask if I could recommend some chocolates to replace those her mum loved – Terry’s Spartan.These were a box of chocolates with a black and orange mountain scene on the front, that majored on the fact that all the centres were hard (and, as is the way with a lot of now discontinued chocolates, empty boxes of them go for ££ on eBay). Memorial Device on X once said of them: ‘not uncommon to find a box of Spartans with teeth marks in every single one – the unaware searching for the nonexistent soft centre,’ which made me guffaw. I gave Olivia some suggestions but she came back to say she’d ‘found the winner in Audrey’s Chocolates. I gave her a selection for Christmas and she loved them
Graceful wines with a twist in the tale
Subtle but beautiful wines from Savoie and JapanDomaine Belema Imago, IGP Vin des Allobroges, Savoie, France 2023 (from £34.75, terrawines.co.uk (lescaves.co
Gilgamesh, London: ‘It’s a weird trip’: restaurant review
We’re here for a ‘culinary journey’ apparently, but where on earth to?Gilgamesh, 4a Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9NY. Small plates £7-£19, large plates £9-£42, desserts £9, wines from £38A Monday lunchtime, and my phone pings. There’s a text. “Gilgamesh London. It’s our Birthday! ONE milestone gift to you,” it says, with a dizzyingly random use of capital letters
My boiler has broken and I’m finding solace in a slice (or several) of toast | Rachel Cooke
My subject today is toast, which is much on my mind right now, a buttery ticker tape that calls me constantly to the kitchen. Our boiler has packed up, the new one won’t be installed for a week, and though it’s only the central heating that’s down (the cooker’s fine), the freezing cold has turned me into a toast monster. It’s all I want, a feeling I haven’t had since I was a student and living in a house that was so badly insulated, we sometimes had to break the ice on the water in the loo. How many loaves can a person get through in a week? Come back to me in a few days for an answer. I’ll give you a tour of my chilblains at the same time
Ludovico Einaudi: ‘The way you blend the elements you eat is similar to composing a piece of music’
I live in Torino [Turin], a town where I grew up, where I was born. There’s a famous dish from there called bagna cauda. It’s a meeting of the garlic from the area of Piedmont, the mountains, with the anchovies coming from the sea in Liguria. It’s a very simple dish, a bit like a broth, perfect in winter, and you eat it with raw vegetables of the season. But there’s so much garlic in it that, when you eat it, you need a couple of days away from other people
Labour’s revolution of local government will be seismic but won’t be straightforward | Richard Partington
‘Alarming’ data reveals high diabetes risk for pregnant women in English jails
‘It’s not ethical and it’s not medical’: how UK rehab clinics are cashing in on NAD+
The pill hasn’t been improved in years. No wonder women are giving up on it | Martha Gill
As menopause wars rage, social media skirmishes erupt over new approaches to hormone therapy – and Sydney is about to be a flashpoint
‘Revenge porn’ abusers allowed to keep devices with explicit images