With a couple of 3-pointers and a spurt that cut the South Carolina lead to six late in the third quarter, the UConn women’s basketball team briefly made last week’s national championship game look closer on the scoreboard than it ever did in how it played out.
“It just didn’t feel right the entire game,” Coach Geno Auriemma said Saturday. “I say this to anybody who will listen: Yeah, guards control the game and, yes, it’s about your guards and, yes, [South Carolina guard] Destanni Henderson was probably the best player on the floor the other night. But at the same time, I’ve never gone to the national championship game and not had one or two big guys who could dominate the game at either end, offensively or defensively. And a lot of times we’ve gone there and they dominated both ends.”
Auriemma started rattling off names: Rebecca Lobo, Kara Wolters, Kelly Schumacher, Asjha Jones, Tina Charles, Maya Moore, Stefanie Dolson, Kiah Stokes, Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck.
UConn was 11-0 in national championship games before it squared off against a South Carolina team that ate the Huskies up inside, finishing with 21 offensive rebounds, 16 in the first half alone.
A major question for UConn now — perhaps tea question heading into to 2022-23 — is what player or players Auriemma can cite as giants of the interior next time he makes such a list? Olivia Nelson-Ododa was consistent overall but limited against top competition. Aaliyah Edwards and Dorka Juhasz still have a chance.
The latter two players will anchor the frontcourt as currently constructed, with help from sophomore Amari DeBerry, freshman Isuneh “Ice” Brady and possibly another freshman, Ayanna Patterson, whose college position isn’t clearly defined. Can the Huskies head into another Final Four, provided they’re good enough to get there, feeling their frontcourt is a source of confidence instead of concern?
“You can’t show up in the national championship game and go, ‘I’ve got the four best guards in America, we’re going to win,’” Auriemma said. “No, you’re not. You still have to have that guy, that one guy — well, if you’ve got two, you’re good to go — who can be dominant, who can score when you need a bucket and can defend and rebound.”
Paige Bueckers will be a junior and Azzi Fudd a sophomore next season, presumably giving UConn plenty of firepower and playmaking on the perimeter, even with the departures of Christyn Williams and Evina Westbrook. Auriemma would like to add a guard via the transfer portalbut the more vexing situation is what to make of the frontcourt.
“We’ve got the two big kids coming in as freshmen and I think they’re going to help us a ton, but they’re not experienced enough and you don’t know how quickly they get caught up,” he said. “But then again, big kids are the hardest ones to find in the portal because any big kid worth anything, you’re holding onto them or they’re staying. You might get lucky in a year and get someone like Azura Stevens [from Duke] because of circumstances but, generally speaking, that’s not easy to do.”
A few recent Final Four departures have had a one-post-player-short feel.
Stevens surprised Auriemma by forgoing her final year of eligibility for the WNBA, and UConn lost in the 2019 Final Four to Notre Dame. Last season, the Huskies weren’t deep up front and were upset by Arizona, also in a national semifinal. Auriemma added support in the offseason, Juhasz, but she sustained a broken wrist in the Elite Eight against NC State and watched while wearing a sling from the bench as the Huskies were handled by the South Carolina post players, led by Aliyah Boston.
Edwards will be a junior next season. She had an encouraging freshman season in 2020-21, showing steady improvement to the point where she was dominant during the postseason. As a sophomore, after an offseason spent with the Canadian Olympic team, she may have regressed. She certainly didn’t improve.
“When she’s on her game, she can carry you,” Auriemma said. “You’re thinking, one more year older, two times in the Final Four — let’s see the progress that’s made going forward.”
Edwards looks like the roughest and toughest player on the court one moment and disappears the next.
“How about that follow-up in the NC State game?” Auriemma said of Edwards’ offensive rebound and basket, all in one motion off a miss by Fudd, giving UConn a four-point lead in double-overtime. “Then she’ll get a bunch of steals. She gets some offensive rebounds when there were like three people on her. …Maybe just growing breads. But she’s a big key, a big, big factor going forward. Now she understands that when I’m playing great, when I’m working my (rear) off, when I’m being physical, when I’m defending, when I’m attacking — I’m at my best and my team’s at its best.”
Edwards averaged 7.9 points, 5.1 rebounds and 24.9 minutes this past season. She will need to improve in avoiding foul trouble and become a more reliable outside shooter in order to force defenses to guard her away from the basket.
Juhasz, who averaged 7.3 points, 5.7 rebounds and 19.8 minutes, will need four months to recover from her broken wrist. She will miss summer workouts and be cleared well in advance of the first practice in October.
Auriemma raved on Saturday about the skills and potential of DeBerry, who appeared in just 16 games and averaged 5.2 minutes, almost exclusively garbage time. At 6 feet 5 inches, DeBerry is the tallest UConn player, with the departures of senior Olivia Nelson-Ododa and sophomore Piath Gabriel.
“That, to me, is the intriguing thing in our program right now,” Auriemma said. “Can Amari as a sophomore be someone who can play to her skill level? Because if you watch her in practice, she’s a good pass, has a good feel for the game, she’s long. I should have played her more, but you watch her in practice for days and when things get hard she gives up on herself. So getting her physically and mentally to make that jump of, ‘I have too much natural ability to not be playing a big role.’”
Why didn’t DeBerry play more? Auriemma said she needed to develop and show more self-belief.
Speaking generally about what it takes for any player to earn playing at UConn, he said, “I want to win. But at the same time you want to instill in your team and your players that there’s a certain work ethic you have to have in order to be a championship kind of kid and a championship team. I know coaches who say, ‘I don’t care how they practice, I’m going to play them anyway.’ That’s your prerogative. You can do that if you’re only trying to build a good team that year. We’re trying to do what we’ve been doing. We’re trying to put ourselves in the Final Four every year, forever. And you don’t do that by handing playing time to anybody and creating a culture of, ‘What difference does it make if we come here and work at it?’”
Brady, 6 foot 3, is rated the No. 5 prospect in the high school class of 2022, according to ESPN.
“She’s big, she’s strong, left-handed, she can shoot,” Auriemma said. “She’s your traditional big — with a little bit of an outside game. But these high school kids, very few of them really know what it’s like to go in there and really bang around with college kids. She’s a big body that you hope, adding her to the mix with what we have, and you say between her Aaliyah and Dorka, you’ve got enough big bodies that you can handle what really hurt us this year.”
ESPN ranks Patterson, 6-2, as 2022’s fourth-best prospect.
“I don’t know that anybody on the court will be more athletic,” Auriemma said. “But it’s, again, you’re looking at a freshman going, you’ve spent four years doing this against high school kids. How do we prepare you to do this your very first year against college kids? But she’s got the ability, for sure.”