Why not Geno and UConn?
In his 40th season, will Geno's needle spark them to a title?
He is, in my book, unquestionably the greatest women’s college basketball coach of all time and he might tell you that himself without blinking, daring you to dare him.
She is one smooth-as-silk player that I’ve enjoyed watching as much as I did watching Sue Bird, Rebecca Lobo, Breanna Stewart and that endless run of UConn basketball stars kicking butt for season after season in the woman’s NCAA Tournament. Saw her as a freshman playing a game that was way ahead of her years. Injuries have sorta fouled up what’s normally been a smooth four-year run with a few championships but she’s back and healthy. And her coach has the needle out. Beware, America.
They’re about to take their final NCAA dance together - Geno and Paige, Paige and Geno. And yeah, outside of Storrs, Connecticut, there may not be much of the viewing public rooting hard for Geno Auriemma’s Huskies and his star player Paige Bueckers. But they oughta. Because they play the game the right way, a game that I bet Coach John Wooden would approve of and so would Red Auerbach.
There’s a beauty and a purity to the women’s game at its highest level, which is where UConn breathes, thanks to the ceaseless demands of Auriemma. No dunks. No macho “Look how great I am” clear-outs and hanging on the rim baloney. Just crisp passes, unselfish play and, judging from what I saw the other night against poor Creighton — defense!
Steals, blocks, rebounds in abundance this year which, combined with uncanny 3-point shooting and bench help in waves have made the Huskies once again a potential national championship contender. They’re 31-3, which in other parts of America might be cause for dancing in the street and talk of contract extensions. Not here.
Auriemma, in his 40th season — think about that for a moment — doesn’t sweat that sort of small stuff, not now, anyway. The small stuff he worries about is on the floor, whether in relentless UConn practices or, of course, in the games that do count. Most UConn games, in the not-so Big East are one-sided. So when he faces a Tennessee, a South Carolina, he’s got to ratchet things up. And for nine years, they’ve been just a little short, either on talent or depth or height or luck. A lousy call stopped them against Caitlin Clark and Iowa last year in a see-saw game that was the best in the tournament.
Against Tennessee earlier this year, one of their three losses, they shot poorly, sort of hung in there but seemed to struggle on the boards and I wondered if UConn’s title chances were a few years away until he can find a little more help for the soon-to-be-sensational (if she isn’t already there) freshman Sarah Strong, whose name actually downplays her ability.
Then the Huskies played South Carolina and Dawn Staley’s generally ferocious bunch and utterly spanked them in their place, hitting 3’s from all over, shutting them down in a way that surprised everyone, maybe even Geno himself. So maybe this UConn team can go all the way. Here were two signs that made me think so.
First, how cool was it against Creighton, a team they were pretty sure they could handle, to have the camera zoom in on Geno in the huddle at the end of the first quarter, and here he is, calm as a Niantic Bay clam, talking in a voice that even a librarian would be OK with, telling his ladies: “We’re working our ass off on the defensive end. It can’t stop, all right. All right? It can’t stop. Our transition game’s gotta keep going. We’ve gotta keep pushing the ball. Keep looking up and we can get in the lane.”
As volume and sarcasm have often been key tools in the Auriemma playbook, that he could speak in tones that measured, that assured, utterly confident that his team knew exactly what he meant and had every intention of going back out there to keep doing what they’d been doing.
And as for his star player, as always, Auriemma has the needle handy. After the Villanova game, he said “Paige takes everything I say as a suggestion, (Ed. note: Get it, not instruction, not an order!) so I’ve got to cross my fingers and hope that it lands in the right place…It was the first time in quite some while where she actually just took the ball and wanted to play one-on-one with whoever was guarding her, and I think that’s what we’ve been striving for.”
After Bueckers was named the Tournament’s Outstanding Player for the third time after the Creighton game, Auriemma kept the needle out.
“I think Sarah (Strong) should have got it,” he said. “Paige is so good, and she does so many things, but in another time, in another year, the things that Sarah did would be player, you know, Most Valuable Player, most outstanding player in the tournament. That’s how you win this tournament. You need more contributions from more people. But Paige is consistent. And she plays her best games generally when we need her to play her best games.”
After 40 years, Geno says what he thinks, period. Though it might well be a nifty little psychological prod to his star player as her UConn career winds down, or it might be that he just wants to stir the pot a little bit, cause a little ruckus, give the newspaper and TV folks something to talk about.
Geno Auriemma has always done that, intentionally or not, since he arrived on the scene in Storrs and built this magnificent monstrosity of a basketball program, one that, unlike a lot of other coaches, he doesn’t mind revisiting, discussing, critiquing, looking back. Calling him outspoken is like saying water is wet.
If you weren’t necessarily rooting for UConn, how about watching to see what sort of impact his needle will have on Paige Bueckers? Or if Sarah Strong will win THIS Tournament’s MVP? Let’s face it, there are lots of reasons to watch UConn women’s basketball. Geno has always been one of them.