Once a year, the Baha Mar resort in The Bahamas becomes a tropical getaway for some of the top teams in college basketball.

FloHoops on FloCollege will be the exclusive streaming home of a selection of events being held at the luxurious complex in the Bahamian capital of Nassau, but the focus in this article is on the Pink Flamingo Championship — and what a field to talk about.

• Subscribe to watch the Baha Mar Women's Championship On FloCollege
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• Alabama Women's Basketball: What To Know About The Crimson Tide in 2024-25

The 2023 national champion LSU Tigers and reigning Final Four team NC State Wolfpack make up part of a four-team bracket, which will see NC State play Southern at 11 a.m. (ET) on Nov. 25 and LSU faces Washington at 1:30 p.m. the same day, with winners and losers squaring off two days later.

Multiple top-10 teams are in the field, and ahead of being glued to your screens for all the hoops you can handle on the week of Thanksgiving, get to know what each squad is bringing to the table beforehand.

Here’s a look ahead at five of the top things you need to know ahead of the Baha Mar Hoops Pink Flamingo Championship, scheduled to take place Nov. 25-27 and to be streamed live and exclusively on FloCollege:

No Angel Reese, No Worries?

The close of the 2023 season marked the end of an era at LSU, but what a stretch it was.

With All-American and current Chicago Sky player Angel Reese in Baton Rouge for a legendary two seasons, the Tigers went a combined 65-8 from 2022-24 with an iconic team that played a role in transforming the sport forever, regardless if you loved or hated LSU over the past two seasons. 

Reese’s rivalry with former Iowa/current Indiana Fever superstar Caitlin Clark catapulted women’s basketball’s popularity to a level never seen before, with it reaching a crescendo for LSU when the Tigers took down the Hawkeyes in the 2023 national title game. Iowa got the Tigers back last year in the Elite Eight, but Reese’s legacy was set in stone well before that night in Albany.

The roster will be a little different in Baton Rouge this season, but the expectations have stayed the same for the preseason No. 7-ranked team in the country, per the AP poll.

For one, Hall of Fame coach Kim Mulkey is still around, and as one of the greatest coaches of all-time with a .860 winning percentage and four national titles between her stints at Baylor and LSU, down years don’t happen in her programs. Tigers legend and four-time WNBA champion Seimone Augustus is on her staff for the first time as an assistant, too, as another asset to the program who knows how to win in Baton Rouge.

Oh, and on top of all of that, senior and returning Cheryl Miller Award finalist Aneesah Morrow — a scoring and rebounding machine who has tallied 74 double-doubles in her career — is back with the program, as well, looking to transform herself from being Reese’s running mate last year to a standalone force and national player of the year candidate in her own right.

Flau’jae Johnson’s Time To Shine

She’s an NCAA champion, All-SEC guard, and a recording artist who dropped a rap song with Lil Wayne in the offseason.

One thing Flau’jae Johnson hasn’t been in her LSU career to date, however, is the focal point.

Of course, the former SEC Freshman of the Year and current junior never had to be. With Reese dominating both the headlines and opponents and the emergence of DePaul transfer Morrow last season as a powerful second option, Johnson was still an important piece of the Tigers’ setup as she started 34 games and averaged a career-high 14.9 points per game a year ago, but others on the roster frequently got first dibs production-wise.

There were hints late in the year that Johnson could take on a bigger role, though, and a breakout season into an All-America-caliber player could be on the horizon.

Johnson stepped her game up in the NCAA Tournament, averaging 20.5 points and 6.3 rebounds across four games, and those performances along with her return as a now-veteran leader in Baton Rouge helped her earn Preseason Co-SEC Player of the Year honors with Morrow and Texas’ Madison Booker heading into this season. 

With things going so far so good for Johnson — who dumped a 30-point, 10-rebound double-double on NAIA Xavier (Louisiana) in a big exhibition win Thursday — she might not just be ready to be the Tigers’ top option, but also someone ready to be the next in line to lead LSU back to greatness.

What’s Next For NC State?

It took a 26-year drought, but once the Wolfpack defeated top-seeded Texas in last season’s Portland Regional final to make it back to the Final Four for the first time since 1998, NC State was rewarded for its patience in returning to the national semifinals after years and years of near misses.

The Wolfpack’s run to their second-ever Final Four was a feel-good story — the men’s team also making the Final Four simultaneously helped with that, as well — as NC State had made it to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament six times between Final Four trips (and qualified for the Elite Eight in 2022) but never advanced on again onto the biggest stage in the sport until earlier this year. It was a well-earned welcome back for the Wolfpack, however, as they went from unranked in the preseason to winning nine games over ranked squads on their way to the Final Four.

Three starters — including All-ACC First Team duo Aziaha James and Saniya Rivers —and eight players return to Raleigh for this season from that squad. Throw in a mixture of elite-level freshmen (like five-star recruit Zamareya Jones) and experienced, effective transfers (like ex-Boston University forward Caitlin Weimar, last season’s Patriot League Player and Defensive Player of the Year), and the preseason No. 9-ranked team in America is loaded to the teeth yet again with talent and should challenge yet again in both the Atlantic Coast Conference and NCAA tourney.

Introducing Light It Red: All-Access with Women’s Basketball 📹

Follow the Pack on and off the court as the team gets ready for the 2024-25 season!#GoPack | @NorthStateBank pic.twitter.com/TNzCqempN8

— NC State WBB 🐺🏀 (@PackWomensBball) October 16, 2024

New Surroundings At UW

Members of the Pac-12 Conference since 1986, Washington for the first time in 38 years will be playing in a new league this winter as the Huskies have moved to the Big Ten Conference along with other ex-Pac-12 members USC, UCLA, and Oregon. 

Will it mean that a return to glory is coming for UW women’s hoops, which last made the NCAA Tournament in 2017 and is eight years removed from the program’s Kelsey Plum-led run to the Final Four in 2016? Maybe eventually, but a Big Ten that has six teams ranked in the preseason AP Top 25 and two slotted in the top five won’t show the Huskies much mercy.

Washington’s 2023-24 season started great, picking up a rivalry win over then-ranked Washington State amid an 11-0 start to get back into the AP Poll at No. 23, which was the program’s first ranking since 2017. Then things began to spiral once the meat of conference play began, and though there were bright spots like a road win over All-American JuJu Watkins and USC and a top-10 upset over Oregon State, the Huskies finished 6-12 in the conference and ended up being eliminated in the first round of both the Pac-12 Tournament and the WBIT.

The Big Ten’s preseason polls only listed top-five rankings (neither of which UW made), and there will probably be work to do this year for the Huskies to get out of the mid-to bottom-half part of the standings by season’s end. 

Graduate forward Dalayah Daniels, last year’s leading scorer (11.9 points per game) and rebounder (7.2 rebounds per game), should be the focal point of what the Huskies do yet again, though how the team’s newcomers fare may be their biggest pressing question heading into the season. Coach Tina Langley has a big-time recruit coming in with Devin Coppinger, who was a four-star guard and top-50 player in her class, and transfers Brenna McDonald (Yale) and Tayra Eke (Eastern Michigan) will be key pieces, too.  

“It’s a blessing to do hard things in life with the people that we love.”

The love that @UW_WBB Coach Langley has for her Huskies 🥹#B1GMediaDays x #B1GWBBall pic.twitter.com/JBPCkH7SFG

— Big Ten Women's Basketball (@B1Gwbball) October 2, 2024

Don’t Sleep On Southern

Of the four teams going to the Baha Mar Hoops Pink Flamingo Championship, there’s no denying that Southern has the biggest uphill climb toward finding some success in The Bahamas, simply because the Jaguars are a SWAC team surrounded by three other Power 4 conference squads — with two of them having made the Elite Eight or better.

That being said, Southern is routinely a threat to win the SWAC and earn the league’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, as it’s done twice under seventh-year coach Carlos Funchess. It just missed out on back-to-back March Madness appearances for the first time in program history last season as it lost in the SWAC Tournament, but the Jags were picked second in the SWAC’s preseason poll released last month and should be in the thick of the hardware hunt in their league yet again.

Southern will at least be used to racking up the miles by the time it gets to the Pink Flamingo Championship as it will start its season with six true road games — with the likes of Oklahoma, Iowa State, and Colorado on the docket — before jetting off to Nassau, where the Jags will see NC State first. There, SU will bring a team that lost its top two scorers but gained multiple potential impact transfers like Taniya Lawson, who was formerly a two-year starter at SWAC rival Texas Southern.

A Jags win against any of the other big dogs coming to Nassau would be a huge surprise, but Southern won’t have any fear as its trip to the Pink Flamingo Championship is simply another stop on a loaded nonconference slate. And sometimes, playing with no fear can be a very good thing.

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