The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
What Fudd, Husky teammates can gain from a limited summer practice session
STORRS — Azzi Fudd entered the UConn women’s basketball program from the slingshot of her high-profile recruitment and, like Paige Bueckers a year earlier, arrived in Storrs with as much hype as any high school player in recent years.
She was able to show why in 2021-22 — sometimes, anyway. Not so much at the beginning, nor at the very end, but Fudd flashed the quick-release shooting stroke that Steph Curry once labeled the smoothest in basketball and was occasionally the best player on the court.
But the challenges of getting acclimated to a new life and new level of basketball — and, more so, injuries — disrupted Fudd’s freshman season, preventing her from standing out consistently. The setbacks allowed her, really, to fit right into the theme of a season marked by players forced off the court and into rest and rehabilitation.
“It was really hard to watch her and Paige sitting there, two kids who love to play,” coach Geno Auriemma said last week at the Werth Champions Center. “Two really skilled players and they’re sitting there watching for a big, big chunk of the season. I hope that created a sense of, ‘I really want to make sure I’m ready. I want to be able to play a full season.’
“She went from not playing at all, to playing great, to somebody we were really counting on and was carrying us for long stretches, and then she did not get on opportunity to do that in the last game. I think her season was indicative of pretty much the entire season.”
Fudd wound up playing 25 of UConn’s 36 games, averaging 12.1 points and 27.9 minutes, shooting 45.7 percent from the field and 43 percent on 3-pointers. She had 25 points in a loss to Villanova, 29 in
a victory over Tennessee, 24 in a victory over Marquette.
That is solid work for a freshman, however interrupted. Fudd missed two months with a foot injury, returned and blossomed as UConn got itself together for another run to the Final Four, then was limited to three points and 16 minutes in a national championship game loss to South Carolina . She came down with a stomach bug the night before the game.
Now, like the rest of the UConn guards, Fudd is in Storrs for summer classes and a five-week workout session that is the first building block toward the 2022-23 season. Fudd is doing individual work but is being held out of fullcourt, 5-on-5 workouts for precautionary reasons. Auriemma said the team is wants to make sure there is nothing lingering from the foot injury.
This period, for Fudd and the team as a whole, is just a feeling-things-out phase. For some players, it’s about fine-tuning. For some, it’s about getting comfortable at a new school. For still others, it’s still about getting healthy. Only five players — Bueckers, Nika Muhl, Lou Lopez Senechal, junior forward Aaliyah Edwards and freshman wing Ayanna Patterson — are every-day full-go players at this point. And Patterson banged up her elbow during a workout last Wednesday.
“One of our practice players, their face was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Auriemma said.
Part of Auriemma wonders what the heck the Huskies are even doing in a gym in June.
“I’m still old-school, saying to myself, ‘Why do we even do this?’ ” he said. “We’ve had some pretty good players come through here and really get good and we couldn’t do anything with them in June, July, August. Now you’ve got kids on campus all summer long, working with them. By the time November comes around you go, ‘Hey, you again?’
“So we’re different, I guess, but fortunately for us, all of July and all of August, I don’t see them, I don’t talk to them, they have nothing to do with this place, they’re gone. And I love that. September until the end of March is like a grind, right? Now you get three weeks off in May and then you (work) five weeks in June where it’s right back to the grind. I don’t get it, myself.”
There is value in any team basketball setting, though.
“A lot of times, I think, (players) come out and work with their trainer when they’re in high school, which is the biggest bull that ever existed,” Auriemma said. “Some kids are so good at beating a cone. And then when you put somebody in there that steals the ball from them, they realize that if they would ever put arms and legs on a cone, they wouldn’t be as good as they are. So what they’re learning now is how to play against a live human being. …
“A big thing we’re trying to teach them, also, is as long as they keep score, you have to play to win. And that seems to have gone by the wayside over the years, where it’s just, ‘Let’s just play, let me work out, let me show.’ You just made eight 3s in a row. You just made 15 pull-up jump shots. But when we were down two and there were 3 seconds left, you bricked four in a row.”
Bueckers was on crutches at this point last year, recovering from ankle surgery in April 2021. She missed almost all of last season with a knee injury before returning to lead the Huskies into the Final Four with an epic performance in an Elite Eight double-overtime victory over NC State.
Lopez Senechal, a graduate transfer from Fairfield, is adjusting to a new team, feeling out the stern competition she coveted. A small forward and perimeter threat whom the Huskies hope will stretch defenses with her range, she averaged 19.6 points for the Stags and shot 40 percent on 3-pointers last season as a senior.
Muhl, last season’s Big East defensive player of the year, is working on the other side of her game by simplifying.
“Obviously, we were a different team when Nika was on the floor,” Auriemma said. “Nika has to be better offensively, more consistent offensively. She has to be more of a threat so that people guard her more and there’s less leaving her to go double someone else. She has to be more of a factor, more of a threat, so that’s been her focus this whole postseason, so far: ‘How do I get to the basket more and finish?’ Getting to the basket is not a problem for Nika. Finishing has been.
“If Nika was a baseball player, she’d be put out to pasture because she doesn’t hit home runs. She’d be a singles hitter. We don’t need her to make eight 3s a game. We need her to make five pull-up jump shots after she penetrates. So it’s the nonglamorous things that Nika’s working on. And she’s improved. She’s better right now than she was at the end of the season.”
That season ended in disappointment, of course, creating the notion that UConn players, so frustrated by being on the brink of a national championship, are feeling much different this offseason than they might have in any other summer of their young lives.
“That might be one of the all-time greatest lines of bull I’ve ever heard in my life, how players go, ‘I’m using this to motivate myself for next season,’ ” Auriemma said. “That lasts until about April 14. And after that, it’s gone. Maybe there is that residual effect when practice starts, but I think there’s too many other things going on in people’s lives today.”
Auriemma mentioned iconic players from another era; how in 2001, when Sue Bird was a junior and Diana Taurasi was a freshman, UConn lost in a Final Four to Notre Dame and rebounded to go 39-0 for the program’s third national championship in 2002.
“When Sue and D and those guys lost in St. Louis, they were so embarrassed, they were so pissed off, that from the minute the plane landed when we got back to Connecticut, there was this cutthroat mentality on our team that lasted from the day we landed until they cut down the nets in San Antonio,” he said. “And no one said a word about it. But it was there every day. You could feel it. Nah; today’s world, not so much. Not yet.”