In her final year in Evanston, the senior is looking to take another offensive leap.
Northwestern women’s basketball opens its season Sunday night in an exhibition matchup against Parkside. To celebrate the return of the Wildcats to the hardwood, Inside NU continues its look at the Northwestern women’s basketball team for 2024-25. For our final preview piece, here’s a look at Caileigh Walsh.
Who is she?
Senior; forward; 6-foot-3; from Sparta, New Jersey
2023-24 stats
30 games, 28 starts, 24.6 minutes per game, 13.0 points per game, 5.3 rebounds per game, 1.6 assists per game, 0.9 blocks per game, 44.9% FG, 33.3% 3PT, 86.0% FT
2023-24 review
After leading the Wildcats in scoring as a sophomore in 2022-2023, Walsh was expected to have another major scoring season. The junior started off her third campaign in purple and white strong, scoring over 10 points in three of the team’s first four games. However, after scoring just 22 points in three games in late November, Walsh was briefly pulled from the starting lineup, coming off the bench against Georgetown and Bradley.
The Walsh who returned to the starting lineup seemed to be a brand-new forward. The Bradley game marked the beginning of a string of six straight games with 14 or more points, including a 22-point outburst against Rutgers. Late December was also a great stretch in the rebounding department for Walsh, as she corralled five or more rebounds in five of those games.
As the calendar flipped to January and Northwestern got into the heart of the Big Ten schedule, Walsh’s scoring trailed off slightly from the December outburst. The big issue there was foul trouble — Walsh committed four or more personal fouls in six of the Wildcats’ eight January games. Even with limited minutes thanks to that foul trouble, she still had a great rebounding month, including a 12-board outing in the team’s second contest against Penn State.
Walsh closed the season strong, scoring in double figures in four of the season’s final six games. When March hit, the 6-foot-3 forward played at her best. In the final two games of the year, on the road against Rutgers and against Purdue in the Big Ten Tournament, Walsh slapped up consecutive monster performances. It was easily her best two-game stretch of the year: 48 points, 14 rebounds, 5 assists, and 4 blocks on 17-of-36 shooting (and 5-of-13 from beyond the arc).
Strengths
Walsh is a three-level scorer in every sense of the word, and that bears itself out in her stats. She was in the topmost quartile in the nation in true shooting, three point attempt rate, field goal attempts per 40 minutes, three point percentage, free throw attempts per 40 minutes, and free throw percentage. Of every Big Ten player with a usage rate of over 28% last year, only Sarah Williams, Ashley Owusu, Mackenzie Holmes and Caitlin Clark had a higher true shooting percentage.
Walsh put up nearly seven shots per 40 minutes at the rim, but also five three pointers per every 40 minutes. In total, that means she took 11.7 shots per 40 minutes that were either at the rim or from three point range, putting her in the 97th percentile in the country. But while her shot chart might look like Daryl Morey’s dream scenario, Walsh could also be lethal from the midrange. Despite taking only 1.7 midrange shots per 40 minutes, Walsh converted 35.5% of them, good for the nation’s 61st percentile.
As evidenced by the shot chart, Walsh is well above average from just about everywhere on the court, and the one blue zone — the corner three — saw just seven attempts from Walsh all season. And defensively, she was almost as well rounded. Her defensive rebounding rate of 18.6% was by far the best on the team, and her block rate of 3.5% was surpassed only by Paige Mott. In totality, Walsh was the second-best player on the team in wins above replacement at 2.4.
Weaknesses
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that most of the metrics used to describe Walsh’s offensive prowess were rate metrics, and not total metrics. The reason for that is simple: foul trouble. Walsh simply couldn’t stay on the floor last year — her 3.6 fouls per game was literally a first-percentile (read: worst nationally) mark. Walsh’s foul efficiency — the rate of combined steals and blocks to total fouls — was 0.35, by far the worst in the rotation. And despite her high block rate, her ratio of blocks to personal fouls was just 0.25.
And that sloppiness carried over to the offensive side of the ball as well. Walsh’s 2.5 turnovers per game was the second-highest mark on the team, dipping her assist-to-turnover ratio to just 0.63. Walsh could also struggle garnering second-chance points, with an offensive rebounding rate of just 4.9%. That meant that just 19.2% of Walsh’s points were on second-chance opportunities, and only 50.1% of her points were in the paint. For a player that will receive the lion’s share of minutes at forward this season for Joe McKeown, making sure she can stay on the floor — and in the paint — will be paramount.
Expectations
Paige Mott is now departed, meaning Walsh is the only returning player who averaged more than 4.2 rebounds per game last season. Melannie Daley can fill up the bucket with ease, but it will be Walsh that determines the Wildcats’ ceiling. That pesky foul trouble cut down the minutes of a player who looked like one of the Big Ten’s best offensive forces — when she could stay on the floor. Her shooting efficiency is never in question, but it’s in the margins of her game — namely, offensive rebounding and ball control — that improvement will be paramount. It’s Walsh’s last year in purple and white. As long as she can cut out the sloppy play, she should make it one to remember, and potentially make another offensive leap.