In many ways, 2023 at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall was the year of Mackenzie Holmes. So it was only fitting that she closed the year out with one last big game.
Holmes opened the year with a strong performance. IU hosted Nebraska on New Year’s Day last season, and pulled out a tight win in overtime. The forward led the way with 22 points on an 8-for-14 line, 10 rebounds, and five blocks.
From then on, in most games Indiana played this year, Holmes was the best player on the court. Her 2022-23 campaign was unlike any other in the history of IU women’s basketball, and one that will be a large part of her growing legacy as a Hoosier. She became the program’s first-ever first-team All-American, and won IU’s first Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year award for women’s basketball.
Her numbers are slightly down this season, but Holmes has continued playing at a high level. She’s led the Hoosiers to a 10-game winning streak after an early blowout loss to Stanford, and they look as dangerous as expected with Big Ten play restarting in full.
She capped off this year to remember on Sunday afternoon — New Year’s Eve — as IU hung on for a close 77-71 win over Illinois. The graduate student scored 30 points on an efficient 10-for-14 clip, and she went 10 for 12 at the free-throw line. She added seven rebounds, two assists, two blocks, and two steals.
It’s the type of performance she’s turned in so regularly in 2023, it can almost become commonplace. It’s more notable for Holmes to have a rough game than one like this. But her teammates, like senior guard Chloe Moore-McNeil, try not to take these days for granted. They know it’s a special experience to be on the court with Holmes when she plays like that.
“It brings me joy, personally, watching the work she puts in every day. Nobody deserves this more,” Moore-McNeil said after the game. “I would say, just being out there with somebody like that, you really have to soak it all in and be grateful for it every single day.”
Indiana really needed Holmes against Illinois. Fifth-year senior guard Sara Scalia has enjoyed a brilliant start to the season, with 16.5 points per game entering the game and one of the best 3-point percentages (47.9) in the country; but she just wasn’t hitting her shots on Sunday. Sydney Parrish tied Holmes with a team-high seven rebounds, but she, too, struggled in the scoring department.
Moore-McNeil stepped up with her biggest game of the season to help make up for the down games from the other guards. But Indiana doesn’t win this game if Holmes doesn’t also have her biggest game of the season.
Holmes, ever-humble, credited everyone else around her for the big game.
“I think it’s just the confidence that my teammates and my coaches instill in me every day. They trust me, I trust them,” she said. “So I think it’s just knowing that I have to go out and play confident and be great on both sides of the ball.”
The forward, as she’s done so many times, took over the game down the stretch. The fourth quarter was her biggest period of the game, with 13 of her 30 points. But particularly, in the last five minutes, Illinois just couldn’t stop her. IU led by three points with five minutes remaining on Sunday. And over the next four minutes, no other Hoosier scored. Everything went through Holmes, and rightfully so. Moore-McNeil, Scalia, and Yarden Garzon scored in the final minute to put the game away, but IU wouldn’t have been in that position if not for Holmes’ dominance.
She drew four fouls in that span, and went 5 for 7 on the ensuing free throws. She also went 2 for 2 on field goals, and totaled nine points, just in the final five minutes. It was vintage Mackenzie Holmes takeover mode — Illinois forward Kendall Bostic is a good player, but she and the Fighting Illini just had no answers for Holmes.
The graduate student has had plenty of big games like this throughout her storied IU career. This was her fifth with at least 30 points. But she just seems to find another gear in these close ones. It’s not always against the best teams on Indiana’s schedule, but the Hoosiers play a lot of tight contests in the Big Ten.
Holmes, like great players do, thrives in these moments.
And if one on-court performance could sum up 2023 at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, it was Mackenzie Holmes’ against Illinois.
“We have seen her do what she did tonight and hopefully she’ll have more of those nights,” IU head coach Teri Moren said. “But I think it was just a matter of her feeling confident, wanting the ball, seeing that thing go in, making the right decisions, and then she gets to the free-throw line for us, which is huge, and is able to stick ’em. And so she is — as everybody knows in the Big (Ten) — she creates problems for other 5s in this league to defend her because of her footwork, her hands, all of it. It was great to see her have an afternoon like she did today. It really was.”
