The Blue Demons officially move on from the Doug Bruno era, but there are big questions as to whether or not they can get back to winning like they did under his direction.
Team: DePaul Blue Demons
2024-25 Record: 13-19, 8-10 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Sixth, three games behind Villanova and two in front of Providence.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #127
Her Hoop Stats: #180
BartTorvik.com: #116
Postseason? Just a cartoonishly hilarious 80-73 loss to Xavier in the Big East tournament first round.
Notable Departures: DePaul is losing their top two scorers, three of their top four rebounders, and their assists leader…. who was #1 in scoring and #2 in rebounding. We’ll start there, and that’s Jorie Allen. Her collegiate career is now over after starting at Indiana in 2019, earning a COVID bonus season, and also losing a year to injury along the way. While earning a spot as one of just two women to start in all 32 games for the Blue Demons last year, she led the team in scoring (20.0/game) and assists (3.8), and pulled in a pretty healthy 5.8 rebounds per game too. I’m going to guess that she did some of her scoring because of her rebounding, as Allen averaged three offensive rebounds a night last season.
The #2 scorer on the squad was Taylor Johnson-Matthews, who has ended up at Clemson with at least one year of eligibility remaining. She averaged 14.5 points per game and was the three-point threat that Allen was not, converting at a 36% rate last year. She also averaged 3.2 rebounds and a steal per game to contribute in more than one place.
The other top end rebounder DePaul loses is Haley Walker, who has transferred to FAU with two years remaining. She averaged just 12.6 minutes per game, but finished third on the team in rebounding at 4.1 a night. According to Her Hoop Stats, that means she was top 140 in the country in defensive rebounding rate and #75 on the offensive glass. Kind of a bummer that she didn’t play more, given that DePaul was a middle of the road defensive rebounding team last season.
Angelina Smith was a more-often-than-not rotation player for DePaul, playing 16.7 minutes while appearing in 27 of their 32 games and starting 10 times. Her numbers aren’t wild — 3.4 points, 2.1 rebounds — but she was a contributor as a freshman, and that’s something. She’s off to Oakland with three years of eligibility to go.
Going by averages, it’s hard to say that Grace Carstensen was a big help for DePaul last year, but she averaged over 17 minutes a night. She started in the last three games of the 15 that she played before suffering a season ending injury. She has two years remaining, and she’s joining Walker at Florida Atlantic.
Notable Returners: DePaul is losing a lot of top end contributing talent, but they bring back several women who had roles on the team last year. The two biggest roles went to Kate Clarke and Meg Newman, and you can put them in whatever order makes sense to you as to who is the most important. Clarke is the double digit scorer (11.9/game) who shot 36% on a team high 6.8 three-pointer attempts per game. Newman is the team’s leading rebounder from last season, stacking up 8.2 per contest and doing it in just 25 minutes a night. The former Alabama transfer did her work mostly on the defensive glass, but when you’re #13 in the country in defensive rebounding rate per Her Hoop Stats, you can take it easy on the offensive glass in my opinion.
Sumer Lee played a lot of minutes for DePaul last season, finishing third on the team in total and best amongst returning players. She also didn’t do much with her 801 minutes gathered up while starting 30 times in 32 appearances, averaging just 2.6 points, 2.3 rebounds, and 2.8 assists. Okay, okay, the assists are actually best amongst returning players, “didn’t do much” is slightly unfair.
Shakara McCline played in all 32 games and picked up 13 starts, while Natiah Nelson appeared 26 times and started in four of those. They both had roles on the team, but weren’t asked to carry much of a load. That’s not that big of a deal for a sophomore and a freshman respectively last season, especially with Nelson averaging just 10.8 minutes a game.
I feel like we have to mention Ally Timm here. As a freshman, she played in 39 total minutes off the bench across DePaul’s first two games, scoring 15 points thanks to 5-for-13 three-point shooting, and then suffered a season ending injury. Seems like she was going to do a lot for DePaul last year, but the injury stopped that. If she’s 100% healthy heading into this season, I presume the coaching staff will ask her to jump right back into the fire like that.
Key Additions: The Blue Demons bring in one freshman and six transfers. I’m guessing that between the returning players and the transfers, specifically the three seniors on their final year of eligibility coming in, that we won’t see much of freshman Gina Davorija (5’9” guard).
With that in mind, let’s look at the transfers.
The biggest addition here in terms of previous contributions is Kate Novik (5’9” guard), who spent the last two years at Morehead State. She started most of her games there, including all 24 as a sophomore last season while missing six contests in the middle of the year. Across the two seasons, she averaged 12.2 points, 5.1 rebounds, 4.1 assists, and 2.0 steals. There’s a big question about her as a shooter, as she went from 38% as a freshman to just 21% as a sophomore on three-point attempts.
After Novik, things start getting a little questionable as to how these women fit into the Big East. Devin Hagemann (5’6” guard) starting 19 times in 32 games as a freshman at East Carolina, but only averaged 5.5 points per game and shot under 28% on three-pointers. Justis Odom (6’2” forward) averaged 8.6 points and 4.5 rebounds across two seasons at Lindenwood after not really playing much at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. Michelle Ojo (6’0” forward) played 59 games at Delaware in three seasons (although just three mid-season contests in 2023-24) after transferring out of George Washington, but averaged just 5.7 points and 3.6 rebounds in 14.7 minutes per game this past season for the Blue Hens. Faith Okorie (6’0” forward) played 64 total minutes for George Mason last season after missing her first year on campus with an injury.
Finally, there’s the wild case of Aizhanique Mayo (5’9” guard), who is now enrolled at her third Big East program. She’s only ever played for Xavier after enrolling at Marquette and leaving the team shortly before the season started. She was a mid-year transfer to Iona, where she did not play, and then followed Billi Chambers to the Musketeers. Mayo saw her minutes fall in her second season of action in Cincinnati, ultimately averaging 8.4 points and 2.2 rebounds for a XU team that went 7-24 and just 1-17 in conference action. She did shoot 37% on 4.9 three pointers per game in her 51 games with Xavier, which is kind of a lot of shots for someone who wasn’t starting all that much.
Coach: Jill Pizzotti, entering her first official season as a Division 1 head coach since 2005. She served as DePaul’s interim head coach this past year after working on the Blue Demons’ sideline as an assistant to Doug Bruno since 2011. She went 113-167 as head coach at Saint Louis between 1995 and 2005.
Outlook: Doug Bruno’s run of 17 straight NCAA tournament appearances plus an 18th year in 2020 where they would have made the field is officially planted in the rear view mirror of this program. Not only has the team not made the NCAA tournament or the WBIT OR the WNIT for the past three seasons, but they also haven’t finished the year with a winning record, either. The era of “well, at least DePaul’s women’s basketball team is pretty good” is over in Lincoln Park.
Now, if you want to give head coach Jill Pizzotti a break on 2024-25, I’ll allow it. Doug Bruno suffered a stroke in August 2024, and I can see how that could throw a program into upheaval for a year. The problem is that Pizzotti’s year as interim head coach extended DePaul’s run of losing records. It wasn’t a one-off, it was a continuation. Even worse, it was a continuation of the Blue Demons being kind of lousy on the defensive end of the floor, as their #295 ranking in the Her Hoop Stats’ metric marked the fifth straight sub-200 ranking and the 14th straight year with a sub-100 defense.
DePaul had that big long run of success under Bruno because they could score the ball like crazy. That didn’t happen last year, finishing up at #184 in HHS’ offensive rankings, and they got there on sub-200 rankings in field goal percentage, two-point shooting percentage, three-point shooting percentage, and effective field goal percentage.
Which leads us to pointing out that Jill Pizzotti had two winning seasons as Saint Louis’ head coach in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and only once did her Billikens finish with a winning record in Conference USA action. Yes, she was on staff during The Reformation, where the Blue Demons won five straight Big East regular season titles and six in seven years as well as five conference tournaments. That’s also wildly inconsistent with her history as a head coach, and we have to say that if Pizzotti was a mastermind of how DePaul was running, then we have to ask why she wasn’t slowing down their decline over the last several years.
That’s why putting her in charge of the program seems so weird to me. It feels like DePaul athletic director DeWayne Peevy said, “yeah, well, her stuff is already in the office, it’s fine,” even though she really doesn’t have the credentials to get the job. The fact that she coached a losing season (admittedly under hard terms given Bruno’s sudden medical situation) and DePaul announced a national search on March 28th just doesn’t make sense relative to the Blue Demons proclaiming her the full time coach just six days later. Just giving her the job while announcing Bruno’s retirement would have made more sense than what they did, at least from the outside looking in.
DePaul has a useful returning core of players, as long as you kind of ignore the losing record thing. This isn’t a situation where the cupboard has emptied out for Pizzotti. That’s good news, because the incoming transfers don’t particularly spark any kind of attention. If all they have to do is fit in around Kate Clark and Meg Newman toting the mail for the Blue Demons, then what Pizzotti’s doing with this transfer class is probably fine.
Is it going to result in a winning record this coming winter? I’d have to say that I’m not holding out a lot of hope here, at least not until I see them at least try to play something resembling defense. And if it doesn’t? How long does the 59 year old Pizzotti get to keep this job? Or even want to keep this job?