Twenty-five years ago, Dave Smart and Taffe Charles were in their basketball primes, racking up points as OUA first-team all-stars for Queen’s and Carleton, respectively. With their offensive-minded games, you could be forgiven for not predicting, a quarter century later, they would be at the helm of the two most dominant defences in Canadian university basketball.
Smart’s success as head coach of the Carleton men’s program is well documented. He’s won 13 national titles in the last 15 years, with nine national coach of the year awards along the way.
Charles was one of Smart’s assistants for the first five of those titles before taking over Carleton’s women’s program in 2007. This week, he took the women’s team into the Final 8 Tournament as the No. 1 seed for a second straight season.
Last year, the Ravens left with a bronze medal. This season, on the strength of a defence allowing a U Sports-best 45.9 points per game (nearly 10 points better than the next closest team), they’re chasing the first women’s national title in school history.
“Dave [Smart] and I scored a lot of points, and that’s the ironic thing,” Charles says. “I took pride in defence as a player, but never quite like this.”
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Charles’s team’s Final 8 tournament got underway Thursday, and the very first possession of their quarterfinal win over Calgary was emblematic of what makes the Ravens so difficult to score against: As a Calgary player drove down the lane, Carleton fifth-year point guard JenJen Abella — a former Ontario Colleges Athletic Association defensive player of the year — stepped in to take a charge. There was a lot of contact, no call, but no shot either, and the ball swung out to the corner. When a second Calgary player drove down the baseline, Abella quickly stood up, got outside the restricted area, and attempted to take another charge. A lot of contact, no call, but again, no basket either.
“It was a gritty effort,” Charles says. “Today we reminded ourselves what we do well.”
“At Mohawk [College], I got defensive player of the year, but I came here, and it was tough to get used to initially,” Abella says. “In college I definitely did whatever I wanted defensively, but here it’s much more team defence. There are a lot of details and [Coach Charles] has very specific things he wants to do against each team.”
In his 11th year on the sidelines for the women’s team, Charles believes he’s found maybe the best defensive team he’s ever coached, men’s or women’s. Or, at least, the most coachable: “I’d argue that my team, this year, they listen better than any team I was with on the men’s side,” Charles says.
The starting lineup is almost a template for how to defend at an elite level. Elizabeth LeBlanc, a six-foot wing who won U Sports defensive player of the year this week, produced a rare combination this season: Routinely shutting down the opposition’s top scorers while almost never drawing fouls. In 23 regular-season games, she was whistled 16 times. So far through four playoff games, just once has she been nailed for a foul.
“An incredible player,” Windsor head coach Chantal Vallee says. “She’s athletic and is successful at every position on the court both offensively and defensively.”
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Along with LeBlanc on the wing you have Catherine Traer and Nicole Gilmore, who give Charles three interchangeable players all listed between five-foot-10 and six-foot-one who can guard nearly anyone on the court. Then you add Abella, a five-foot-three pest of a point guard who needs to be told she can’t try to draw charges in practice because of past concussion issues. Anchoring things is six-foot-three post Heather Lindsay, who grabs rebounds at a higher rate (18.7 per 40 minutes) than all but one player in the country, and is the most effective shot blocker on a team that leads the country in swats (5.9 per game).
“First, they have length at every position,” Ryerson head coach Carly Clarke says. “They also rotate and support each other incredibly well. Then, they’re physically tough and rebound better than almost anyone in the country, too.”
And to top it all off, that starting lineup is entirely made up of senior players, three of whom are in their fifth year. That mix has provided a sense of urgency to a starting unit that knows this is their last shot at winning a title together.
“It’s do or die for us,” Abella says. “We know it’s our only chance to get a national title.”
Carleton is on quite a run heading into the national semi-finals on Saturday. They held Calgary to a season-low 42 points in the quarter-finals, and the Dinos could only manage to connect on 26 percent of their shots (which sounds impressive until you realize Carleton’s opponents averaged 27 percent this season).
The Ravens are now two games away from completing a perfect season: 27 games down, 27 wins. And among those victories, you’re just as likely to find a 50-point margin as you are a game decided by single digits.
Not that the team is bragging about it.
“We don’t even look at the undefeated record,” Abella says. “We just want to work hard on defence and get stops. We want to be underdogs.”
The Ravens don’t play like they’re a powerhouse chasing history. Charles has somehow managed to convince a collective Goliath to play like scrappy Davids.
“There’s no doubt he’s a defensive guru,” Vallee, a five-time national-champion head coach, says. Her Lancers were knocked out in the Ontario semis by Carleton. “Every time we play him we know it’s going to be a low-scoring game. It’s always a battle.”
“Our priority will always be our defence,” Charles says. “It’s what got us here in the first place.”