FINDING THEIR FOOTING
Huskies hit a new gear following a rollercoaster regular season
“I always thought that if we’re going to have to suffer through all this, there’s got to be something good at the end.”
— UConn coach Geno Auriemma
Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet and All’s Well That Ends Well. And even Macbeth and a Midsummer’s Night Dream.
When UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma was asked to describe this past season he thought of Shakespeare.
He thought of the playwright’s tragedies and comedies. He thought of all the ups and downs of this year — both on and off the court — that have affected his team. Starting with the first days of summer conditioning last June to Paige Bueckers’ ACL injury and all the injuries that followed to winning the Big East Tournament last week.
“It was like a Greek play. There were pieces of everything. Shakespearean, maybe,” he said. “There was the high of June. There was the low of August. There was the high of November, those wins, the Portland wins and all that. And then there was the just utter disappointment in how many people we had to keep losing and losing. So it was like every act was a different act in of itself. We had to go through all these.”
The Huskies have gone through back-to-back roller coaster seasons. Constant injuries and lineup rotations mixed with off-the-court losses.
That inconsistency was in full effect this year.
Some games, the Huskies played lights out with every player firing on all cylinders. In other games, it looked like a whole different team that struggled to piece together an offense not disrupted by turnovers.
The lack of consistency can be blamed on a handful of things: a limited number of available bodies, fatigue, players trying to do too much and even a disconnect between what Auriemma is preaching and what actually plays out during games.
UConn showed it had better control of itself in last week’s Big East Tournament, winning three straight games by an average of 23.3 points. But now heading into the NCAA Tournament, with every game win-or-gohome, the Huskies will need to do whatever they can to stay on solid ground.
“Most teams that aspire to win championships at a real high level, when they’re good, they’re really good as a team, as individuals, and on bad days, they drop down here,” Auriemma said following the regular season finale, raising his hands a few inches apart to demonstrate. “And this team when we’re good, we’re really good and when we’re bad, I can’t see them. I don’t recognize them.”
UConn ended the regular season with 10 straight games finishing within 10 or fewer points of opponents, including ending the regular season with a 60-51 win over Xavier on Feb. 27.
Sure, some of those opponents were just as good — UConn lost to top-ranked South Carolina 81-77 — but it was more than that.
For example, Xavier (winless in Big East play) was able to string together an 11-0 run in the second quarter to actually lead momentarily over the Huskies.
Auriemma said later that win “felt like a loss.” He told the media that if his team were to say how it was that day, without adding back any injured players or fixing its mistakes, their run in March would be short-lived. He went as far as to say he didn’t think the UConn team that night had enough to reach the Final Four.
He was no longer buying the excuse his players were fatigued. They’ve played shorthanded all year.
He was no longer entertaining the idea that they weren’t playing up to par because their best players were injured. When the team had its good days, it was unstoppable. There was more behind it all. “There’s a reason why the last 10 games have been the way they’ve been,” he said after the Xavier game. “That has nothing to do with fatigue. We used that long enough. That story’s stale. Now, it’s just being held accountable for doing what you’re being coached to do. Not what you feel like doing. Not what feels right for you at the moment. So, I’m tired of the fatigue thing. I’m tired of ‘We’re hurt.’ That has nothing to do with it. … It has to do with a lot of selfishness.”
Auriemma said players weren’t listening. He would call a play a specific way and instead they’d go out and do it differently. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time it didn’t. He blamed the disconnect on both the players and himself and the rest of the coaching staff.
But how did it get to this point in the very last game of the regular season?
UConn had started the year in June when all 12 players reported for summer school and conditioning.
Yet, less than three months later the team took its first, and biggest, hit of the year. Star guard Paige Bueckers tore her ACL and would be out the entire season.
The Huskies took time to process the news. Everyone understood they all had to step up. Auriemma picked up Inês Bettencourt later that month to have a backup point guard for his previous backup point guard, Nika Mühl, who would ascend to the starting role.
UConn started the season on brand. The Huskies won their first six games, including the Phil Knight Legacy Tournament in Oregon, by an average of 28 points. Sure, they were without Caroline Ducharme (neck stiffness) to begin the year and lost Dorka Juhász (thumb) after the second game for the next seven, but it seemed this UConn team wasn’t going to miss a beat.
But then came December. Star sophomore Azzi Fudd (UConn’s next-best player behind Bueckers) suffered a knee injury at Notre Dame in the team’s first loss of the year.
The next game, Mühl suffered a concussion.
The Huskies had just seven players and started Bettencourt at point in their loss at Maryland on Dec. 11. However, despite the injuries and loss, Auriemma left that game proud of his team. They had kept pace with the Terps until the last five minutes and lost only by seven.
Yet, the roller coaster season still had a few loop-de-loops left.
UConn again had seven players a couple weeks later at Creighton. Fudd remained out, Aubrey Griffin was out with COVID-19 and Amari DeBerry was stuck in New York due to a snowstorm.
Players returned one by one through January — Fudd came back for a game and a half before getting reinjured.
The constant carousel of players’ absences and then working them back into the fold took time and energy. Schemes had to be redrawn to adapt to players strengths and weaknesses. Players had to learn to adapt quickly to playing with different lineups and how to work together.
Everyone’s minutes increased due to injuries. Starters were averaging playing 32-plus minutes per game, which only made it harder to fight through the physical and mental exhaustion. During a stretch of eight straight games, Mühl played 39 minutes or more.
That exhaustion was evident in the Huskies’ loss at Marquette on Feb. 8.
UConn had lost to top-ranked South Carolina by only four three days prior, with four starters playing 37 or more minutes.
Add in the stress of traveling and coming down from the game’s high to then facing a standout Marquette team and the Huskies simply had nothing left in the tank. All five starters played at least 35 minutes in a 59-52 loss that Auriemma called it “the lowest point” of the season.
The Huskies had to grind out the next eight games. The only time they failed to do so was on Feb. 21 in a 69-64 loss to St. John’s in Hartford.
“We lost our way individually, you know, the players,” he said. “And then you would have great performances by individuals, but not three in a row. You’d have somebody play great Monday, but then be awful Thursday and then be pretty good on Saturday. It’s no way to live.”
After the regular-season finale against Xavier, Auriemma challenged his players to beat the inconsistency. They had five days until the start of the Big East Tournament and he needed them to be better.
He saw them each acting like a double-sided coin, he said.
On one side, each player had the ability to lock in on that dominant, aggressive, will-towin mentality. When they all did that, they could dismantle any opponent. They never gave up a possession and they continuously fought until the final buzzer.
On the other side, however, they’d succumb to fatigue, they’d try to run plays their own way and just end up making mistake after mistake.
“The inconsistency is probably the biggest disappointment, that for long stretches you can look like the best player in the country and then for stretches you look like you’ve never played basketball before,” Auriemma said.
Before the Big East Tournament last week, UConn had only played one game (Nov. 14 against Texas) with all 10 of its active players available. So the second return of Fudd brought the team to a whole new level.
Fudd didn’t even have to score an absurd amount of points during the tournament. Her presence simply rejuvenated the offense as the Huskies’ blew past Georgetown and Marquette by 30 and 29 points, respectively. And come Monday’s tournament championship game, they looked the best they’d looked since November.
“I think that we responded well given what we did tonight,” Aaliyah Edwards said on Monday. “I think that we knew going into postseason it’s going to be harder games. We were playing all the teams we’ve matched up against the whole season. We just really had to lock in and come in with an aggressive mindset that we knew we wanted to get the job done here so that we could move on to our next postseason.”
Auriemma said himself that inconsistency isn’t easily fixed. Fudd’s return didn’t solve all the Huskies’ issues, but it reminded this team what it’s capable of when it needed it the most.
UConn’s path to a 15thstraight Final Four starts next weekend in Storrs in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
On Sunday, during the Selection Show, the team will find out which teams will attempt to spoil its path to Dallas.
But ultimately, it’s up to the Huskies to determine how the season ends: empty-handed or with an NCAA-record 12th national championship.
“I always thought that if we’re going to have to suffer through all this, there’s got to be something good at the end,” Auriemma said. “That’s what I kept saying to the team you know, with everything that happened that was going bad. I said, ‘Nobody deserves to be dealt this hand so there must be something at the end.’ … Last year was complicated, this year, I can’t even find one word to describe it.”