A sad, stunning end
Electric McDonald, Arizona deny UConn chance at playing for 12th title
The UConn women’s basketball team won 11 national titles and made 21 Final Four appearances — 13 in a row. The program has the experience and the prestige, even if its young players do not. Arizona, who never played in a national semifinal game prior to this season, has not come close to those heights.
None of that seemed to matter on Friday night at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
Third-seeded Arizona, in a position it’s never been in before, looked like the more comfortable team and beat No. 1 UConn 69-59 to advance to Sunday’s national championship game against Stanford, the top overall seed in the NCAA Tournament that beat No. 1 South Carolina in the other national semifinal game.
Senior Aari McDonald, the Pac-12’s defensive and overall player of the year, led the Wildcats (21-5) with 26 points on 7-of-17 shooting. UConn junior Christyn Willliams scored a team-high 20 points before she fouled out, while freshman Paige Bueckers, named the AP national player of the year this week, scored 18 for the Huskies (28-2).
The loss was UConn’s fourth consecutive defeat in the Final Four, and its first double-digit NCAA Tournament loss since 2007.
Here’s how Arizona pulled off the wire-to-wire win.
Turning point
McDonald drilled a 3-pointer just 42 seconds into the game to open the scoring, and the Wildcats showed early that they were not scared of UConn or overwhelmed by the moment.
At the time, it appeared to be Arizona’s best player continuing her hot tournament (she scored 30 points in back-to-back games entering the Final Four). It turned out to be a lead that the Huskies would never catch up to.
“I think we came out with the wrong mentality,” Williams said. “We thought it was going to be easy, I guess. We got flustered, they had great ball pressure, and it wasn’t like anything we’d seen before this season. We just couldn’t get in a flow offensively.”
Arizona led 16-10 after the first quarter and held a 10-point advantage at halftime. The Huskies cut Arizona’s lead to as little as one point midway through the first quarter but could never even tie the game.
At one point in the third quarter UConn trailed by 14 points — its largest deficit of the season.
Williams, who had been UConn’s best player through three-and-a-half quarters, fouled out of the game with 3:51 to go in the fourth. If a comeback had seemed unlikely already, it was even more impossible with the junior guard on the bench.
“The officiating was different this game,” Williams said. “Me personally, I didn’t think it was a foul on me. I thought it was on [Olivia Nelson-Ododa] ... I knew that I had four fouls. Obviously I was devastated because I had to go out of the game, and there were three or four minutes left in the fourth quarter. Obviously I wanted to be out there, but that’s just how it went.”
Keys to the game
UConn played its worst first half of the season, with a season-low 22 points on 32 percent shooting (8-for25 shooting). Arizona’s defense was stifling and kept Bueckers, 1-for-4 in the first half, in check as McDonald was the primary defender.
The Huskies, on paper, had the size advantage. Arizona’s Cate Reese (6 feet 2) is the tallest players who sees the floor regularly, and UConn averages more rebounds per game than the Wildcats.
It did not matter. UConn barely lost the rebound battle (36-34) and the Huskies’ bigs (Nelson-Ododa and Aaliyah Edwards) shot a combined 3 of 13 from the field as the team made just seven of its 22 layup attempts.
“We just missed shots that you’ve got to make at this level, in this point in time,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “You’ve got to make those shots. You’ve got to make those layups you get. You’ve got to make those open three’s that you get, because they’re not easy to come by.”
McDonald is Arizona’s ace defender, but it took more than just the 5 foot 6 guard to slow down the Huskies. The Wildcats rotated well on defense and recovered quickly if a UConn guard slipped past the first line of defense to limit open shots. They trapped post players and pressured the Huskies at half-court to disrupt offensive sets before they could even begin.
The unrelenting Wildcats seemed to have an answer for every UConn run in the second half, too. Bueckers hit a jumper, and Williams hit a 3-pointer early in the third quarter to pull the Huskies within five, but Arizona responded with a 5-0 run of its own. When UConn went on a 7-0 run at the end of the third quarter and beginning of the fourth to cut the Arizona lead to seven points, the Wildcats answered with a 5-0 run to extend the lead back to 12.
UConn went on a 5-0 run with 4:18 left in the fourth — Williams hit a 3-pointer and a pair of free throws — but there was McDonald again, who banked in a layup, got fouled and hit the free throw to bump Arizona’s lead back up to nine.
Bueckers hit a timely 3-pointer, the final one of her freshman season, to pull UConn within five points with 1:26 left in the game, but Arizona didn’t shake. Sam Thomas hit a pair of free throws to give Arizona a 62-55 lead. Edwards sank a layup with 1:03 to go, but Arizona’s Bendu Yeaney hit two free throws — her first attempts of the game — to build the lead back up.
Player of the game
McDonald. The tournament’s leading scorer continued her strong play on both ends. She led the Wildcats in scoring and helped hold Bueckers to just five points on 25 percent shooting in the first half.
“I said going into the game, I don’t think we’ve had to play against a guard as good as she is,” Auriemma said. “She just dominated the entire game, start to finish. We pride ourselves on being pretty good at certain things, and we had no answer for her.”
Stats of the game
Arizona’s defense, which McDonald described at half time on ESP N’ s broadcast as“suffocating and stingy ,” forced 12 UConn turnovers leading to 14 points and held the Huskies to a season-low 59 points on 35.7% shooting.
The Wildcats scored 17 fast break points — many of which came off of UConn turnovers — and made eight of their 15 layup attempts, and outscored the Huskies 22-18 in the paint.