BATON ROUGE – The phone rang and rang on Kailyn Gilbert‘s end. Tennessee finally returned her call but was too late.
When the now LSU women’s basketball guard was in the transfer portal this past offseason and was actively shopping her game for the next home, Rocky Top was on her list of places she wanted to check out.
But the new Lady Vols coaching staff were a tad too late to the race.
And that aloofness has lit a fire under Gilbert the two times her and the No. 4 Tigers have battled Tennessee.
Gilbert has scored a combined 45 points, including 23 points in LSU’s 82-77 win over the Lady Vols Sunday inside the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.
“I can say that they picked up the phone too late in the portal,” Gilbert said when asked why the matchup with Tennessee is a good one for her. “I was kind of upset about that.
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“So that’s where you get the fire from every time I play them.”
“I sure am glad they were late,” Kim Mulkey chimed in during the team’s postgame press conference.
Mulkey trusted Gilbert in both games against Tennessee this season in the biggest of moments. In the first meeting in Knoxville back in January, Gilbert hit the acrobatic game-winning layup to lift the Tigers, 89-87.
Gilbert scored a team-high 23 points against the Lady Vols Sunday, hitting a monster 3 that gave LSU the lead back. She made a pair of free throws that stretched the Tigers’ lead to 80-76 with 21 seconds remaining.
“She was phenomenal today,” first-year Lady Vols coach Kim Caldwell said after the game. “I think that I did a really bad job of recognizing and adjusting to that. She killed us at our place, too. So if we play them again, we’ve got to do a better job on her.
“But she does such a good job of finding her spots, hitting big shots and getting other people into the game by – getting the crowd into it. She makes big plays and she’s a good player.”
After her heroic performance on Rocky Top, Gilbert hadn’t had another game where she scored more than 6 points. She had performances where she shot 2 of 12, 1 of 9, 1 of 8 from the floor. But Mulkey and her coaching staff never wavered from Gilbert and how she can impact the team when the game is on the line.
“She’s an older player, she worked her out of (the funk),” Mulkey said. “I listen to my coaches more than you think. I tell them make suggestions, if you make 10 suggestions I might listen to only one of them but keeping making suggestions.
“I give (LSU assistant coach) Gary Redus credit because he kept telling me, ‘Go with KG. This is the style and the type of game she can flourish.’ I give him credit for putting her back in after the first time I took her out.”
The challenge for Gilbert now is staying in this momentum she’s building. With a trip to No. 6 Texas, which knocked off No. 2 South Carolina at home Sunday, next up and postseason play around the corner, Mulkey and Gilbert both know her play can be critical for a team that’s looking to win championships.
“I’ve been looking at film late nights, trying to get myself out of this,” Gilbert said. “Hopefully this is the start of something.”
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Cory Diaz covers the LSU Tigers for The Daily Advertiser as part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow his Tigers coverage on Twitter: @ByCoryDiaz. Got questions regarding LSU athletics? Send them to Cory Diaz at bdiaz@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: LSU’s Kailyn Gilbert relishes facing Lady Vols. How she’s ‘killed’ them
