Finding its footing
Auriemma not optimistic UConn can make a March run
STORRS — Hours before blizzard conditions blanketed campus Monday night and sent cars spinning down Route 195 with as much traction as the UConn women’s basketball team has on its dissolving season, Azzi Fudd snapped off jump shots and darted through the layup line with great energy.
This is where the incremental progress of recovery from a knee injury had brought Fudd, to the heart of pre-game warm-ups, seemingly to the brink of a return that should and would signal more than a flicker of hope for March …
If the Huskies, on the whole, weren’t so discombobulated.
Ninth-ranked UConn, its national standing having taken a hit with the struggles of a wildly uncomfortable month, wrapped up the regular season and the February portion of its schedule with a 60-51 victory over lowly Xavier — another uninspiring and disconcerting performance, this one a bridge to the postseason.
Rarely has the calendar flipped to March with such bleak assessments and forecasts coming out of Gampel Pavilion.
“The players ain’t what they used to be,” coach Geno Auriemma said. “And the coaching ain’t what it used to be, either. I don’t think we’ve coached these guys as well as we coached some of the other guys, and that’s evident when you watch us play on the floor, that we look like a poorly coached team. And that’s me, my staff.”
Auriemma was asked about his injury-plagued team preparing for the possibility of three games in three days at the Big East Tournament.
“If we don’t get some things fixed,” he said, “I don’t think we’ll be playing three games.”
Minutes later Auriemma was asked about the possibility of a 15th consecutive Final Four.
“The way we are right now, this team, as it is right now, don’t add anybody, who we are right now, that ain’t happening,” he said, shaking his head. “They could fool me. They’ve been fooling me
all year. I think they’re going to cut right, they cut left.”
There is the romantic notion that Fudd, who hasn’t played since Jan. 15 and has missed the past 14 games, could make a triumphant return, much the way Paige Bueckers did in 2022. To know Fudd is close to playing again, and to understand that her jump shot can change games as quickly as any skill possessed by any player in America, is to hold on to fleeting hope that there is, buried beneath what’s taking place, something special in store.
But one player isn’t fixing this.
The longer Fudd remains sidelined, the more difficult for her to make an impact worth counting on or remembering. Bueckers returned from her own knee injury last season with two games remaining in the regular season and needed those games and the Big East Tournament to truly settle in before finding herself and, famously, scoring 27 points in an epic doubleovertime victory over NC State in the Elite Eight.
Fudd has played just nine games this season. She has missed 22 of the past 24. And, transcendent skill aside, it’s yet to be proven that she’s wired in a way to carry a team in spots that Bueckers has.
“I don’t think somebody can miss that much
basketball and come in and be the player they were right off the bat,” Auriemma said. “Between physically being ready and incorporating into the scheme of things on the team, it’s not going to be an easy transition if it does happen at all. But at the same time, if it does happen, it’s better than if it doesn’t.”
Of course.
Fudd, perhaps the best 3-point shooter in the nation, would have to be accounted for and UConn desperately needs capable scorers. Her 10 or 20 or 30 minutes a game — whatever it can be worked up to — would mean rest for overworked players and Auriemma could shuffle guards in and out. She would give them another ball handler, too.
If the presence of Fudd, who was a full-go through shootaround for the first
time Monday, was to complement a project trending in the right direction, if her return were to feel like finetuning, UConn would be skipping into March.
That’s not the case, though. UConn is lost right now, having regressed since an encouraging performance in a four-point loss in to topranked South Carolina early this month. That basketball is ugly. Monday should have been easy. Xavier has lost 19 games in a row. The Huskies have played 10 consecutive games decided by 10 points or fewer, the last eight by single digits.
“It has nothing to do with fatigue,” Auriemma said. “We used that long enough. That story’s stale. Now it’s just being held accountable for doing what you’re supposed to do, not what you feel like doing. I’m tired of the fatigue thing. I’m
tired of, ‘We’re hurt.’
“We don’t think very well. We don’t speak on defense. We don’t communicate. That’s got nothing to do with tired or being injured. That’s has to do with a lot of selfishness.”
Auriemma smiled a lot but his 19-minute press conference was a window into his frustration. It came after the Huskies (26-5, 18-2) edged the Musketeers (7-22, 0-20), the only winless team in the Big East. UConn finished alone atop the conference and has now won at least one championship — conference regular season, conference tournament or national title — 30 years in a row.
“It’s kind of hard to fathom, especially when you sit where I’m sitting right now and see what I’m seeing right now,” Auriemma said. “those UConn teams that won those other 29, that team
don’t live here anymore.”
The year’s team is a shell of itself, decimated by injuries and limited by players more accustomed to lesser roles. What rankles Auriemma, though, is a stubbornness in approach of some players and seeing mistakes on repeat. The same group, after all, had it going pretty well just weeks ago.
Auriemma stopped his critique at one point and mentioned feeling bad for players. Just a little, he would only concede.
“I don’t think they were prepared to play this many minutes under this kind of pressure and have to perform every day,” Auriemma said. “So when they were coming off the bench or whatever their role was, they could afford to be good today and not so good Wednesday and great Saturday and lousy next Tuesday. … But now you’ve got to do it every day, dude. They probably weren’t prepared for that.
At some point, it breaks.” It broke in February. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed in March.
It’s just feeling increasingly unlikely.
“It’s easy when you have a Paige out there who just fixes things,” Auriemma said. “Or when you have an Azzi out there that makes four straight 3’ and things get fixed.”
Maybe Fudd will return and make some of the problems go away, make some of this look easy. Remember when it all looked so easy, day in, day out? UConn’s last national championship was seven years ago, Breanna Stewart’s senior season.
“I knew I should have gotten on that plane with Stewie in 2016,” Auriemma said.
He smiled and laughed. And then he walked off to navigate the storm.