The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Duke coach defensive after loss to UConn
ALBANY, N.Y. — There’s a way to play defense and a way not to play defense, and both Duke and UConn did a strong job of it on the Times Union Center court Saturday.
UConn, the most hellacious transition team to ever ruin the women’s game, was held 18 points under its 89.9 per-game average. Duke, which according to coach Joanne P. McCallie made history with its number of three graduate players — the smartest of the smartest — was held 10 points under its 69.1 average.
UConn won, 72-59, because Lexie Brown, one of the most talented guards in the nation, could connect on only four of 11 shots and finished with 10 points in her last college game, far below her average of 19.7.
The Huskies advanced to the Elite Eight for the 13th straight time because they held sharpshooter Rebecca Greenwell to six points in her last college game, far below her 14.2 per game.
The Huskies accomplished their mission not by using one player, but by using their entire team, stressing out the two Blue Devils with 1 1⁄2 defenders, switching off screens like crazy and playing the connected defense that continually makes champions out of a program that is obviously ruining the sport.
Yes, there’s a way to play defense and a way not to play defense, and McCallie did a lousy job of it off the court in Albany. When you grow defensive in front of a microphone, you’ve got to be careful and you’ve got to be right. You also ought to try to be half as protective of your school’s student journalists as you are of your student-athletes.
At a time when “fake news” crowds our societal consciousness as much as March Madness, that is something for a coach at one of the premier educational universities in the world to consider.
After Azurá Stevens transferred from Duke to UConn, McCallie spoke out in 2016. I get it. She’s sick of UConn winning. Everybody’s sick of UConn winning. Everybody, of course, except UConn and UConn fans. They like the winning. At any rate, believing that UConn was getting needy, she told The Chronicle, the
independent Duke student newspaper:
“Is that what we’re about now, ‘I’m going to take transfers’? That was the neat thing they used to have. Connecticut wasn’t a transfer school. Now, even if they win, who cares?”
Also, “You know why [Auriemma’s] doing that? Because talent is down. And he wants to continue to win.”
The matter had essentially blown over. Stevens wanted nothing to do with it. Auriemma, who enjoys setting brush fires at times, shrugged it off.
McCallie? She threw a Duke student under the bus.
She was wrong to do it. She also was wrong. It was a really p-poor job.
Asked about the critical remarks Friday at a news conference and whether she still felt that way, McCallie said, “I did not make those remarks. That’s what the media wrote.” So you were misquoted? “Oh, completely. Completely. Completely. I guess that happens sometimes.”
Only The New York Times on Friday contacted The Chronicle sports editor Hank Tucker, who did the Q&A with McCallie.
“We transcribed what she said properly,” Tucker told the Times. “I think we gave all the context we needed.”
Guess what? The Chronicle posted the audio. I listened to the entire answer. McCallie talked in general terms about transfers and what it means, etc., before she spoke directly to UConn. If some other outlets later wanted to focus on what she said about UConn, that’s not The Chronicle’s problem.
Yet when told Saturday that The Chronicle posted the audio and the quotes were consistent with what was printed, and given a chance to clarify her statements,
McCallie blew it again:
“No, again, it’s all out of context, and I don’t think this is the time for that,” she said. After praising Stevens, she said, “It would have to take too long to understand what the points were there and I’m not going to go into it … I can’t go back to that stuff. I don’t appreciate it, so I won’t.”
Actually, it was the perfect time to clarify her error. Instead she threw a student journalist under the bus in a p-poor fashion. And journalists don’t appreciate it. She owes The Chronicle an apology.
Look, Auriemma has gone off plenty over the years. He has been wrong to do it sometimes. Yet, frankly, when hit with this recurring nonsense that his team is bad for the sport, he has mostly been fairly restrained in recent days. He has turned to playful sarcasm. There has been some spectacularly dumb stuff written the past week. It happens every March when those who rarely watch the sport tune in for 30 minutes and immediately become experts.
Knowing this, Mike DiMauro of the New London Day asked Auriemma, what do we make of this game, when you only won by 13 points?
“It’s not as easy as we make it looks sometimes,” he said. “This is not easy stuff. This idea that, well, they have all the best players, of course they should win every game by 40 … Every single kid in Duke’s starting lineup was probably first-team [high school] All-American. So when you’re playing against pretty good players, you shouldn’t be able to win by the numbers that we win by sometimes and certainly not in the NCAA Tournament. That makes no sense. Not at this stage of the tournament anyway.
“After the Quinnipiac game, somebody said it was just one of those games we had to grind it out. I don’t know if people talk about 25-point games as a ‘grind it out,’ but that’s kind of where we are. That’s the world we’ve created and we’re just doing our part to make women’s basketball a little more competitive. There’s probably a couple dopes out there that were waiting for a 60-point win so they could weigh in, so we’re just keeping them at bay for a little bit longer.”
And with that Auriemma left the podium to the hallway where he was asked about Dan Hurley’s hiring as the men’s coach. He said he really didn’t know Hurley, but said there’s lots of excitement and proof that the UConn brand is still strong.
“You can say what you will, how long does it really take to go from ‘You’re a brand that has won four national championships in 20 years’ to all of a sudden ‘We’ve lost it?’ ” he said. “I don’t know; it happens quickly. Sometimes people want it to happen quickly, but this isn’t one of those things where Connecticut’s going away. We’re still Connecticut basketball. We still have something very few other schools do have.”
And he actually said it without insulting anybody. Geno, the diplomat. Wow.