UConn seniors stepping up for Auriemma
On Sunday, UConn coach Geno Auriemma said his team was in need of a quarterback.
On Wednesday, the Huskies found three.
All season long, UConn’s three seniors — Christyn Williams, Evina Westbrook and Olivia Nelson-Ododa — have struggled with consistency. Williams fought through shooting slump after shooting slump. Westbrook had five turnovers against Louisville and six against Creighton. NelsonOdoda had a strong game against South Carolina and then seemed to decline defensively.
All three seniors were challenged to step up against Butler Wednesday, to be more impactful and to just be better. And by the final buzzer, all three had. They set career-highs and season-highs and paced UConn through its most dominant win of the season.
“There are a lot of things that happen with my players that I have no explanation for. I wish I could tell you, ‘Here was what different from Sunday to today.’ I don’t know,” Auriemma said after the win over Butler. “I just know that when you play a lot of basketball, when you’re a senior, I think the expectation that you have for yourself, and that your teammates have, is that you consistently play at a certain level.”
Auriemma said he took his seniors aside after Sunday’s game against Creighton and told them he wanted them to be better. Williams had scored 13 points
(the most she’s had since Dec. 3) and had three turnovers on Sunday. Westbrook had a season-low two points and a season-high six turnovers.
The Hall of Fame coach needed leadership on the court just as much as he needed it off the court while the team continues to balance injuries.
“After the Creighton game I made a point to say to our three seniors, ‘There’s no easy way to say this. We need more from you guys,” Auriemma said. “You need to perform better. That’s it. Whatever that means to you, you need to play better. That shouldn’t be taken as pressure or a challenge. That’s just a statement of fact.
“I think hopefully they took it to heart, the three of them and hopefully this is the beginning of a beautiful thing.”
To challenge Westbrook, Auriemma swapped her out of the starting line up and replaced her with sophomore Nika Mühl. It was the first time in the senior’s entire career (spanning two seasons at Tennessee and two at UConn) that she did not start.
Despite coming off the bench, Westbrook was the offensive spark Auriemma was looking for against the Bulldogs. She checked into the game three minutes into the first quarter and immediately made an impact, directing plays and always finding her open teammates.
“Evina can score. She can figure out ways to get the ball to the basket,” Auriemma told SNY at halftime of Wednesday’s game. “She’s more of a scorer than Nika is so that’s a bigger boost coming off the bench than bringing Nika off.
Westbrook played 25 minutes off the benchand scored 13 points with four assists, two rebounds and one steal.
“She was definitely sharp tonight. She was on-point with everything that she was doing and a great thing about her is she doesn’t let that stuff get to her,” Nelson-Ododa said. “So, she’ll be able to push through and fight through that and really not let the noise affect her. You could see that in today’s game where she just kinda brushed that off and was like ‘OK, just keep going.’ She knows what to do. She knows how to play. That was evident tonight.”
Prior to Wednesday’s game, Auriemma also challenged Williams.
The 5-foot-11 guard always put a focus on scoring. Yet, Auriemma noticed that when she has a bad shooting night, her impact lessens as she becomes fixated on her shot-making instead of trying to help elsewhere. So, after Sunday’s game, he told Williams wanted to see her impact the game outside of scoring. He wanted to see her step up defensively and expand her focus outside of just shooting the ball.
“Christyn got a steal Sunday in the Creighton game. Kinda came out of nowhere and stole it, went in for a layup,” Auriemma said. “So, this past week, I made a couple comments to her like, ‘You know you have seven (steals) for the season. That’s in 10 games. And you just got your seventh yesterday. What if you
got two of those every game? That’s easy, right? That’s three, four, five, six easy points, right?
“And what if you got two offensive rebounds? What if you did these kinds of things on a regular basis, what would that do for your game? If you got more involved rather than just, ‘I wait to get the ball and then I try to score and if I don’t score points, I really don’t have an impact on the game.’ ’”
Williams finished Wednesday with a career-high seven steals on top of a game-high 19 points and a season-high seven rebounds (including a seasonhigh four offensive boards).
“I thought today she had a huge impact on the game in a lot of ways that she hasn’t had this entire season,” Auriemma said. “If you’re just waiting and obsessing about shooting the ball and you go through a stretch where the ball is not going in, you start obsessing about it even more and it goes in even less.
“So, if you’re doing all these other things, it takes your mind off of ‘I’m shooting it bad, why? I missed the last three 3s, why?’ You don’t have time to think about those things because you’re too busy doing all these other things that are impacting the game.”
The senior guard said she took Auriemma’s challenge to heart and also noticed her focus change during the game.
“I’m just trying to impact the game, Williams said. “People look at me as a scorer and that’s how I look at myself but there are other things that I can do on the floor as well.”,
Nelson-Ododa had a season-high 19 points — the most she’s had in a single game since facing High Point in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in March 2021 — and tied the game-high with seven rebounds.
Auriemma attributed her success, along with the other two seniors, to UConn’s ability to control the game’s pace and play uptempo on both ends of the court (as a team UConn scored 43 points off of Butler’s 27 turnovers).
“By pushing the tempo and playing quicker and looking to get the ball up in the air quicker, I think Christyn, Liv, E they benefit from something like that because there’s less worrying about ‘Where do I go next with the ball? What play do I have to make next?’” he said. “We took a lot of the thinking out of it today and it helped everybody, not just the seniors. But it was great to see the three of them play great.”
The Huskies play three games in the next eight days, starting with Xavier on Saturday, and remain without two of their best shooters in Paige Bueckers (recovery from a tibial plateau fracture and a torn meniscus) and Azzi Fudd (foot injury).
Auriemma will look to his seniors to do what they did on Wednesday in every game moving forward, including rising to the challenge that much more each time.