Four seniors to be honored before regular-season finale

It’s been a long and somewhat winding road for UConn women’s basketball’s senior class.

Two came in as highly touted freshmen. One came in as an upperclassman transfer from one of UConn’s most storied rivals. The other; a graduate transfer from Ohio State, had a first year in Storrs that has been one of the program’s most turbulent seasons to date.

On Sunday, Christyn Williams, Olivia Nelson-Ododa, Evina

Westbrook and Dorka Juhász will be honored with senior day celebrations before UConn’s regularseason finale against Providence (2 p.m.) in front of a sold-out home crowd at Gampel Pavilion.

UConn has won four regularseason conference titles, three conference tournament championships and made two Final Four appearances in the span of the four seniors’ Husky careers in Storrs.

The matchup against the Friars will mark the first last for the seniors, as all of UConn’s games after Sunday will be win-or-go home with the Big East Tournament next weekend and the NCAA Tournament two weeks later.

“It’s bittersweet. I’m very excited for the next chapter but we also have unfinished business to take care of,” Williams said. “Yes, it’s our last game at Gampel but we still have a lot of games to be played, like we have the whole postseason. So I’m not really looking at it like it’s the last game ever but it’s bittersweet. I’m excited and sad at the same time.”

Williams was the No. 1 recruit in the class of 2018, followed by Nelson-Ododa ranked at No. 5. The duo’s freshman year ended in typical UConn fashion with a trip to the Final Four, where the Huskies fell to national champion runner-up Notre Dame.

Yet that was the duo’s only normal season. Their sophomore year was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic canceling the postseason in 2020, and their junior year was rocked with game cancellations and resched

volved, and how everyone responded.

“She gives them confidence,” Auriemma said. “Teams’ confidence sometimes wavers, goes up and down, but if you have somebody like Paige on the floor, whose confidence never wavers, that kind of is infectious. The rest of the team now knows there won’t be any droughts.”

Everything feels like it just got easier for UConn, even as everything is about to get more difficult. The Huskies, all circumstances considered, held it together pretty well without their best player for 19 games. They close the regular season Sunday against Providence, Senior Day at Gampel Pavilion, and have the Big East Tournament and NCAA Tournament from there.

“Every other team is probably going to improve in the postseason,” Auriemma said. “But we improved by who we added. I don’t know that anybody else is adding somebody like that.”

For all the points and assists and basketball production Bueckers must offer if Final Four and even national championship aspirations are to take hold, Friday was an example of how just having her in the building with a plan to play in place — creating an ability to feel normal again — can elevate a team of over-thinkers.

The score was 19-4 when Bueckers checked in to an ovation 6:19 in. Azzi Fudd already had taken over another game. Her first 3-pointer made it 10-0. Her second made it 17-0. Fudd was on her way to a gamehigh 19 points in the type of blowout that has made so many Big East opponents wish they never got off the bus over the years, the type that hasn’t always come easy this season.

“I’m not really focused about me and getting back to the old me and doing what I did before because it’s such a different team now,” Bueckers said. “Whatever my team needs, I’m going to do it. And Azzi? She’s cool. She’s a great shooter.”

Fudd made her first five shots and finished 7-for-9 from the field, 5-for-7 on 3-pointers.

“She only needed a fiveminute stretch,” Auriemma said. “And, boom, the game’s over.”

Fudd was actually injured before Bueckers this season, a foot issue that surfaced in November and cost her 11 games upon the team’s return to Connecticut from the Battle 4 Atlantis and a humbling loss to top-ranked South Carolina. Clearly, Fudd is a different player now, production matching the hype.

Up and down the lineup, in fact, there are players Auriemma trusts because he was forced to for so long, and they showed him something. Now the Huskies add the player with the most talent, the player who as a freshman pulled the team to the Final Four while winning every major individual award, the player that the team hated being without but probably needed to be, in a way.

It wasn’t an experience without benefits. If UConn truly is a different group than the shell-shocked team that scored three points in the fourth quarter of that 73-57 loss topranked South Carolina, it is already in a better place than it has been all season.

Everyone feels good right now.

“The team that she came back to is a better team, has a better understanding of what we’re trying to do, has more players that can do more things than they could the last time she played,” Auriemma said.

Bueckers had surgery to repair an anterior tibial plateau fracture and lateral meniscus tear Dec. 13 and rehabbed through most of December, January and February as teammates road a coaster of confusion to the point of her return. She basically played the second half of the first three quarters Friday. She made four of five shots.

“The way our team has handled adversity, I don’t think any team in the country has been through what we’ve been through,” Bueckers said. “We’ve taken a bunch of hits. But thing about us is we always bounce back . ... It was just awesome for me to get back and try to incorporate myself back into the flow of what they’ve already built.”

What UConn will need from her, eventually, is more than she needed to consider doing Friday. It was a stress free night. It was fun. It was all over UConn players’ body language as much as the scoreboard.

“Just to see my name in a box score with minutes next to it is surreal to me, and amazing,” Bueckers said.

For 12 minutes off the bench instead of 36 as a starter, she helped show what UConn should hope to look like from here.

“She made a couple passes, made a couple plays in the lane, that only she can,” Auriemma said. “She did what Paige does. She did Paige things.”