SACRAMENTO — LSU suffered a heartbreaking loss in the Sweet 16 on Friday night. The Tigers were on the wrong side of a buzzer-beater by Duke’s Ashlon Jackson. After the disappointing end to their NCAA Tournament run, Kim Mulkey is figuring out what’s next. The veteran coach does know one thing: What’s next for her is not retirement.

“I’m not retiring,” she said. “I plan to hire two coaches quickly. I plan to get in the portal and get two or three more players and take a little time off, go see my grandchildren… I think as we get older, as coaches, they want to say how much longer is she going to be in the game? I’m going to be in this game unless LSU fires me, OK, until I can’t put a product on that floor that’s competitive or my health fails me.”

Across her entire career as a player, assistant coach and head coach, Mulkey has won a total of seven national titles. As a head coach, the first three were at Baylor in 2005, 2012 and 2019. The most recent one was in 2023 at LSU with a roster that featured Angel Reese. The last piece of that championship team was Flau’jae Johnson, who officially wrapped up her college basketball career on Friday. Here is what comes next in Baton Rouge.

Flau’jae Johnson says goodbye

Johnson was the defender on Jackson when the Duke player hit the game-winner. Johnson bit on a pump fake, and the shot ultimately led to the end of her LSU chapter.

It was not the way Johnson wanted to say goodbye to college basketball, but from Mulkey’s experience, the hurt won’t last forever. The coach’s message to the team after a loss like Friday’s starts with addressing the seniors.

“You thank them. You start with your seniors, and you thank them for an unbelievable career, an unbelievable year,” she said. “When you invest in things, it’s harder to accept. I have Flau’Jae with four years, Izzy with four years, and Amiya Joyner with one year — you thank them because they’ve invested in this program. And they’ve won a lot of games.

“You remind them that nothing I say is going to make them feel better in the moment and that the sun will come up tomorrow, and you’re going to have wonderful memories from your time at LSU. And then you go and you hug each one of them and you let them cry. I think that’s — I don’t find that a bad thing. If you don’t cry, you’re not really invested and you don’t care. And it’s OK to cry. It’s OK to hurt. And then each day it gets better.”

Her teammates also have Johnson’s back and reminded her that she can use this as motivation for the next step of her career. 

“Obviously, that’s not how she wants to end her senior year and her career here at LSU,” Mikaylah Williams said. “But the conversation we had was for her to remember this feeling and carry it over to the next level, go to the next level and be that same person, that same hard worker that she is and hoop.”

What will next season’s LSU team look like?

As Mulkey pointed out, the team needs to replace two assistant coaches. Gary Redus II took the head coach position with Rutgers, and it wasn’t too long after that Daphne Mitchell decided to follow him. This took place before the NCAA Tournament, but Mulkey was happy they got the opportunity and encouraged them to get to work right away.

“You can’t be married to two wives,” Mulkey said. “I said, ‘Get out of here. Go to work. Get your staff in place. Get your kids that are there to stay.'”

The LSU 2026 freshman class is headlined by Lola Lampley, a 6-foot-2 wing/forward from Lawrence Central High School in Indiana. She is the No. 17 player in the 247Sports rankings and described by director of scouting Brandon Clay as “one of the country’s best forward options in the class” and could potentially “serve as the third basketball handler on offense at the next level.”

When it comes to the transfer portal, the Tigers could certainly benefit from a go-to rebounder. Reese and Aneesah Morrow, who arrived to LSU in 2023, were double-double machines, but once they graduated LSU didn’t have someone specific to rely on on the glass. This season, the team even tried to channel their inner Reese by wearing shirts that said “Anything that comes off that board, it’s mine.”

Unfortunately, one does not replace those kinds of players easily, and not rebounding enough was one of the key issues in the Tigers’ loss to Duke. 

“You put yourself in a position to win the game, and a crazy shot like that beats you. But rebounding and second-chance points really beat you,” Mulkey said. “I think 19 points they got off second-chance. We couldn’t grab a rebound. And you look at the stats, and we had the same number of rebounds, but that’s misleading. We just couldn’t get three stops in a row. We couldn’t rebound the ball so that we could take off in transition. It was kind of like we were moving in mud.”