Last spring, the LSU women’s basketball team dipped into the NCAA transfer portal and pulled out its two best players. This year, it settled on a different approach. The players it signed are tailored more to supporting roles — jobs of augmenting the talent already on the roster.
The Tigers are losing four players: Angel Reese, Hailey Van Lith, Janae Kent and Angelica Velez. To replace them, coach Kim Mulkey and her staff have so far signed five newcomers, four transfers and one freshman.
LSU unveiled three of those portal additions Wednesday, when it announced that it had landed three guards: Arizona’s Kailyn Gilbert, Miami’s Shayeann Day-Wilson and Mississippi State’s Mjracle Sheppard.
That trio will now join former Arkansas forward Jersey Wolfenbarger and Lafayette Christian Academy star guard Jada Richard in a group of newbies.
“The three of them will add a combination of experience and depth on the perimeter for us,” Mulkey said, “and will bolster our roster to continue to compete at an elite level.”
Barring additional roster moves, Mulkey will begin the 2024-2025 season, her fourth at LSU, with 12 scholarship players, the same number she carried into last season.
Aneesah Morrow, Flau’jae Johnson and Mikaylah Williams are set to drive most of LSU’s offense. As for the rest of the group, their responsibilities won’t shake out until the fall, when Mulkey and her staff work to settle a rotation and find the right roles for each player who earns a spot inside of it.
Each newcomer offers a different set of skills.
Gilbert, ESPN’s 25th-ranked transfer, is a 5-foot-8 guard who can score. As a sophomore at Arizona, she averaged a team-high 15 points per game while shooting 42% from the field and 40% from 3-point range.
Day-Wilson, a rising senior, is a 5-6 guard with 71 career starts and a double-digit career scoring average. At Duke, she was named the 2022 ACC freshman of the year, and as a junior at Miami, she hit 37% of the 5.3 triples she took each game.
Sheppard, a long 5-10 point guard, is an active defender. In her freshman season at Mississippi State, she averaged 1.4 steals per game after recording at least five of them in four separate contests, including the Bulldogs’ Jan. 29 win over LSU.
Wolfenbarger is tall and long, with a 6-5 frame. But her game is suited more for the perimeter, where she likes to handle the ball and shoot. In two years at Arkansas, the rising senior took 120 3-pointers but sank only 27 of them (23%).
Both Gilbert and Wolfenbarger missed chunks of the 2023-2024 season. Wolfenbarger sat her entire junior year before entering the transfer portal. Gilbert missed Arizona’s last eight games after coach Adia Barnes announced in February that she was no longer on the team.
As a freshman at Arizona, Gilbert scored 5 ppg in limited minutes off the bench. She then entered the transfer portal in the 2023 offseason but decided to return to the Wildcats for her sophomore year, a season in which she increased her scoring and worked to change how she played defense.
“She didn’t play defense before,” Barnes said on Jan. 12 after Gilbert recorded five steals in Arizona’s loss to Oregon State.
“You didn’t like defense. Last year, she said, ‘I don’t play defense.’ And I’m like, ‘In basketball, you play offense and defense.’ But she’s taken it personal, and I thought she did a really good job. Completely different player.”
Mulkey values defense. So, each of the five newcomers will likely have to prove that she can defend to earn a spot in the LSU rotation alongside its nucleus of returning stars.
That’s especially true for the three guards LSU signed Wednesday. Each will compete for minutes with incumbent Last-Tear Poa, who is now the Tigers’ most experienced ballhandler.