Fudd’s injury was deja vu for UConn
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When UConn women’s basketball star sophomore Azzi Fudd exited the court with a knee injury during the first quarter of Sunday’s game at Notre Dame, there was a sense of deja vu for the Huskies.
Deja vu in that … the last time UConn faced Notre Dame Paige Bueckers went down in the game’s final minute with a knee injury. Bueckers missed 19 games after suffering a tibial plateau fracture and a lateral meniscus tear.
Deja vu in that … this program has seen its fair share, and more, of injuries in the last one and a half seasons. Eight months after her knee injury against the Irish, Bueckers tore her ACL during a pick-up game in the summer. Two months after that, freshman Ice Brady dislocated her patella. Both are out for the 2022-23 season. Plus, both Caroline Ducharme and Dorka Juhász have already missed at least two games each due to injuries (Ducharme’s neck stiffness and Juhász’s broken thumb).
Sunday’s 74-60 loss to the Fighting Irish showed tat while these Huskies have come to accept last-minute injuries, they still struggle to respond on the court when they happen — especially to their best player.
“If we have enough time,
I think they can figure out a way to handle it,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “But when it happens during a game earlier on, I think it can affect, especially when it’s somebody that averages 25 (points) a game or whatever. I think it puts people in a tough spot because now all of a sudden it dawns on them, ‘Now I have to make the shots that we normally would get from somebody else. I have to score more points.’ And it’s daunting on the road against a really good team.”
Bueckers’ injury against Notre Dame happened exactly a year to the day on Monday. Four days later, the Huskies lost at unranked Georgia Tech 57-44 in their very next game. The loss snapped UConn’s 240game win streak over unranked opponents for their first such loss since 2012.
How bad was that loss? UConn scored just five points in the fourth quarter after making just two of 12 shots. The team finished the game shooting 31 percent on field goals and 13.3 percent on 3-pointers. Its 44 total points were the program’s fewest in a single game since 2006. Sure, the team only had eight healthy players without Bueckers, but that wasn’t its only problem.
“There’s no sense of we have a plan of how we’re gonna execute and how we’re gonna get a bucket, who’s gonna get it for us,” Auriemma said after the Georgia Tech loss. “… So, you can blame Paige not being here, yeah that’s part of it, but that’s not the real story.”
Auriemma had similar remarks after Sunday’s loss at Notre Dame.
Fudd collided with Aaliyah Edwards in the final minute of the first quarter. Auriemma called timeout so a trainer could look at Fudd’s knee on the bench. She was immediately walked to the locker room and didn’t rejoin the team on the bench until a few minutes into the second quarter.
She checked back in and played a little over three minutes until Auriemma took her out for the rest of the game for precaution.
“I think she’ll be alright,” Auriemma said after the game. “It was just one of those things that just happens when your own man falls on top of you. So, she tried to go again but obviously, it didn’t look like she could move. So rather than take any chances, I figured we take some precautions instead.”
But when Fudd wasn’t on the floor, the Huskies looked unorganized. They missed open opportunities and defensive reads. They threw passes that went nowhere but either out of bounds or straight to the opponent. Players looked stiff when shooting, almost as if they didn’t know who should be the one scoring.
UConn shot 27.3 percent in the second quarter. Lou Lopez Senechal made two of the team’s three made shots out of 11 attempts.
“I thought when Azzi came out of the game we were very very tentative, very skiddish about who was gonna score, where shots were gonna come from and we started to pass up a lot of opportunities,” Auriemma said.
UConn did outscore Notre Dame in the third quarter 22-17 and lowered its lead to just five, but the Huskies never took control of the momentum.
When it was over, the Irish led by as much as 18 in their biggest victory over rival UConn since 2004. UConn shot a season-low 36.8 percent on field goals.
UConn had Fudd, Bueckers, Juhász (who sat out her fifth-straight game) and Brady on the bench. Excluding Brady (who will make her collegiate debut next year), that’s an average of 45.2 points sitting on the bench unavailable.
“We just didn’t have enough scorers on the floor,” Auriemma said. “Enough people playing at a real high level … We didn’t get enough from enough people in order to beat them.”
Auriemma said he guesses Fudd will be available for UConn’s next game on Thursday when it hosts former Husky Carla Berube and her Princeton squad. However, Juhász’s return will be determined based on how she practices this week.
Auriemma knows his team will digest Sunday’s loss as fuel. He knows one loss in December doesn’t determine a season (UConn still made it to the national championship last year). And he also knows that now his team understands their weaknesses whether they have Fudd or Juhász on the court or not.
“It’s December though and you have to take it like it’s a long season,” He said. “You don’t win national championships or lose national championships December 4th, but you do get to find out what it is that can help you down the road win one or can prevent you from winning one down the road. … We kinda got a glimpse of what could happen if we don’t makeup for whatever it is missing. ...
“Some of the things we did today that hurt ourselves, those aren’t going away just because you add a couple more players. So, there’s a bunch of things that we need to fix, and it became evident today for sure.”