Dawn Staley doesn’t quite have a vision.

But if she did, it might go something like Thursday’s first 20 minutes.

South Carolina women’s basketball beat Duke 81-70 in a top-10 match-up at Colonial Life

Arena, another box checked on a gauntlet of a non-conference schedule. Really, it was a disservice to the first half that the second even required any heavy lifting. The Gamecocks belted the Blue Devils in probably their best 20 minutes of the season, taking a 51-31 lead into the locker room and looking ready to run Duke (8-2) out of the building.

Of course, it did not stick all night. But for two quarters, South Carolina (8-1) looked like the fully operational machine that tore through all 38 challengers last season.

“I don’t know what I envisioned, because sometimes we don’t know what we’re getting,” Staley said.

This was not the first big run of the year. Strictly in terms of numbers, it did not line up with the 32 straight points against Iowa State or the dizzying quickness it flipped the Clemson game on its head. But for maybe the first time in the 2024-25 campaign, the offense looked simple. Fluid. Efficient. Not just relying on turnovers or transition to score, but grinding defenses into dust in the halfcourt with a handful of concepts it could rely on.

In fact, “reliable” was the theme of the game. The Gamecocks are less than a month away from conference play, and will be exactly one-third of the way through the regular season after Sunday’s trip to TCU.

Most of the first month of the season has been about figuring out just that, reliability. Who can be trusted, what lineups play well together, and what offense is still efficient other than throwing the ball to the now graduated 6-foot-7 center.

“I just want somebody that you know when you call their number, it’s not going to tilt too far to the right or left,” Staley said. “They’re going to stay kind of in the middle, and they’re predictable.”

Chloe Kitts was predictable in the best way possible. She tied her career-high with 21 points, and put the team on her back to claw out of a fourth quarter offensive slump. Her high/low action with Sania Feagin in particular was a source of constant easy looks, the first flickers this offense has seen of the post players looking connected and running offense through each other.

“Our posts did a really good job of flashing to the ball,” Staley said. “And we played through them a lot.”

Tessa Johnson and Maddy McDaniel were reliable again. Both guards came off the bench, put the ball on the deck and made a habit of forcing Duke’s defense into tough decisions. Johnson scored on two drives and drew a foul on a third in a short burst, and McDaniel continued her steady improvement with another clean, turnover free game. Really, it felt like everything was working for a half.

You shoot over 60 percent, have assists on over half of said made field goals, score 30 points in the paint and have nine different players score, and you might be forgiven for thinking it was a re–run of last year’s team.

“I thought we did a really good job in the first half of taking advantage of numbers when we had them,” Staley said. “And then reversing the ball when we didn’t have numbers, which increases our shooting percentage.

“I thought we did a good job of just going a little bit deeper into our offense.”

But of course, the 25-point lead did drop to eight, and Duke staggered the Gamecocks into territory of needing to put the game away rather than just cruising through the final frame. Two separate stretches of 3:39 and 4:12 without a field goal looked like a backwards step, or at least a return to some of the November misfires.

Call it an intermediate step, turning on the jets for a half against a top-10 opponent if not for a full 40 minutes.

If nothing else, that lion is still in the cage. South Carolina, at its best, is capable of cutting through even top caliber opponents. That did not look like a given on the flight home from UCLA two weeks ago.

“We know what we want,” Staley said. “Like, we really know when we look good and when we’re most efficient, we know what that looks like.”

Maybe not exactly identical, but it probably looks pretty close to what she saw for a half tonight.

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