Fudd’s everything Geno expected
STORRS — Something Geno Auriemma has already come to appreciate about Azzi Fudd is the way she moves with such consistency on and off the court.
Fudd’s footwork in drills is just about always the same, which is to say it’s almost always perfect. The way she catches the ball and shoots it? Same every time, whether 10 or 25 feet from the basket. Fudd even makes her way through the hallways of the Werth Champions Center with the same presence, putting out the same vibe, every day.
“Azzi just walks around like she’s good,” Auriemma said Thursday outside Gampel Pavilion, where he met the media for an hour, touching on every player and just about every conceivable topic.
There wasn’t much reason, though, for a longwinded breakdown of Fudd’s strengths and weaknesses and potential. Auriemma has worked with her for a month now. The fact that he can succinctly — even tacitly, with gestures and hand motions, as is sometimes his way — sum up a player’s capability speaks volumes about what the centerpiece to UConn’s freshman class brings to the gym and the program.
Fudd, one of the most heralded recruits in the program’s history, will get better and better throughout her years at UConn.
But, even at just 18, she’s more of a refined product than a project.
“I think most of it is what I expected,” Auriemma said. “She’s very quiet, very much introverted, really doesn’t say a whole lot. But her game is much older than her age. Her footwork is the kind of footwork that you would expect from someone going into the pros, someone who has spent three or four years perfecting that. That’s how good her footwork is. And her ability to get shots off and the way the shot comes off every single time, the exact same way, I mean, I knew it, but when you’re watching on a regular basis, it’s pretty amazing.”
Fudd, whose first workout with the Huskies was June 1, is about five months away from sharing the UConn backcourt with longtime friend Paige Bueckers, the 2020 national player of the year as a freshman. Both came to UConn as the most celebrated high school players in America, No. 1 overall recruits, Gatorade national player of the
year winners, transcendent players with much already figured out.
They stand out on the court. And off it.
“There’s an air of confidence that they walk around with,” Auriemma said.
The Huskies are incredibly deep, on paper. Auriemma has more to figure out in advance of the 202122 season than he has in a while.
The addition of Dorka Juhasz, a 6-foot-5 forward who transferred from Ohio State, has buttressed and complicated the frontcourt rotation on a team that returns every key player. In the backcourt, Fudd is reason No. 1 for another logjam. There are 200 minutes in a regulation basketball game. Fudd taking a sizeable chunk is probably the surest of sure things.
“Everybody comes every day knowing that, ‘Whatever it is I want, I’m going to have to work for it every day,’” Auriemma said. “So you have to perform at a really high level every day if you want what they all want — they want to have an impact. I’ve already had a couple (players) say to me, ‘Coach, obviously we know that some of us are not going to play the same amount of minutes we did last year.’ ”
This is a wonderful issue for Auriemma to be analyzing. Bueckers (36.2 minutes a game), Christyn Williams (34.4) and Evina Westbrook (30.7) — all guards — led UConn in playing time last season.
Fudd is as advertised. “All we have to do is get her open,” Auriemma said a couple weeks ago. “Boom, boom, boom. It’s up in the air before you can get your hands up. Swish, swish, swish. Right in (the defender’s) face. Her free throws and her shots from three feet beyond the 3-point line are exactly the same, no difference, no added anything, same routine. A lot of it is God given. A lot of it is her working her butt off every day. I don’t say anything about her shot other than ‘Good job.’”
Auriemma has said a number of times that Bueckers and Fudd are totally different players, likening Fudd to Jim Brown and Bueckers to Gale Sayers. On Thursday, he just motioned, letting his arms flail and swing to represent Bueckers’ herky-jerky style and closing his hands together to demonstrate Fudd’s skills — coordinated, tight, together.
“She’s a lot stronger than I realized,” Auriemma said. “I had never spent that much time, that close. So it’s been fun watching her. She catches it the same way and shoots it the same way. And because her footwork is always right, (the ball) always looks like it’s going in.”
The Bueckers-Fudd era has begun — almost. Bueckers is still recovering from ankle surgery and won’t practice until late August or early September. The season opener isn’t until November. But UConn is clearly loaded, due to another wave of depth topped by another beyond-her-years player in Fudd.
“People are going to have to earn (playing time) and I’m anxious to see how they go about it and how it shakes out,” Auriemma said. “Just because you were something last year doesn’t mean you’re going to be the exact same thing this year. That part is exciting and I can see it already. It’s already evident in every competitive situation that we have out there. It’s a different vibe.”