Auriemma shifting gears
Bueckers’ knee injury forces coaching staff to adjust their focus, but not their expectations
STORRS — When UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma has a team like the one he had assembled, led by a player like Paige Bueckers, he can let most of his midsummer basketball thoughts skip right past winter and toward spring.
Auriemma and his staff were in a mode of fine-tuning last month, starting to consider the small details that might make or break national championship aspirations, when word came down that Bueckers had torn her ACL and would miss the 2022-23 season.
“There was a huge mental shift,”
Auriemma said Thursday, meeting the media for the first time since Bueckers’ injury was announced Aug. 3. “One week you’re having a conversation about what we need to do to get ready for March. And then on one phone call, one day, your conversation turns to, ‘How are we going to compensate for, arguably, losing one of the best players to play here in a long, long time?’ ”
Bueckers, who had a largely disrupted sophomore season after winning every major national player of the year award as a freshman, was injured while driving to the basket during a pickup game at the Werth Champions Center. She had surgery Aug. 5 and will return to the Huskies as a redshirt junior in 202324.
This was a blow on two levels.
One, Bueckers might be the best player in America and her absence leaves a void UConn can’t fill. The Huskies are still as talented as most teams in the nation, and goals to compete for 12th national title remain intact. But the job is much more complicated now.
Two, Bueckers has had an incredibly challenging basketball experience over the past few years, from her days as the nation’s most celebrated player at Hopkins High in Minnesota to her time spent becoming a face of the sport in Storrs. She sustained different injuries, also in the left knee, in early December last year and missed most of the
regular season, returning in advance of the NCAA Tournament and leading UConn to a 14th consecutive Final Four. So the news stung for reasons beyond the effect on a team’s potential.
“Paige isn’t the first player to ever tear her ACL,” associate head coach Chris Dailey said. “Everybody understands that. I was just torn up about it because of what she had gone through last year. She worked her way to come back and since we ended the season she has done everything — stayed extra to be in the weight room, her nutrition, her leadership on and off the court. She had just taken a giant step. And then this happens. So it was disappointing.
“It was emotional for her, especially, and for our players. But I think now it’s kind of just what it is. In some ways, having to have gone through it last year probably helps us, although last year we knew there was a chance she was going back and this year they know that she’s not. So it’s a different feeling, but we have to embrace it, and I think the players have.”
Bueckers limped down the stretch of her high school senior season, slowed by lower-leg issues, and Hopkins’ season was cut short before a state championship game. She then enrolled at UConn through the fog and isolation of a pandemic, becoming a shining light in one empty gym after another, winning every major national player of the year award as a freshman.
She lost almost the entire offseason to recovery from ankle surgery, though, and played just five games before falling awkwardly in the closing seconds of a UConn victory over Notre Dame. An anterior tibial plateau fracture and lateral meniscus tear required surgery and cost her more than two months of the 2021-22 season, one during which the Huskies were decimated by injuries up and down the roster.
Bueckers averaged a team-high 14.6 points in 17 games last season and famously scored 27 in a double-overtime Elite Eight victory over NC State, punching a ticket to her home city of Minneapolis. The Huskies lost the national championship game to South Carolina at the Final Four.
Auriemma asked Bueckers to remain in Storrs this summer, working on strengthening her body to prevent injuries and to better absorb the physical approach of defenders. Then she tore her ACL, a happenstance of basketball and the latest setback, one that marginalized previous plans for the team.
“Losing somebody is bad no matter how you look at it,” Auriemma said. “We’ve had it happen to us every which way. We’ve lost kids on Senior Night. We’ve lost kids in the NCAA Tournament. We’ve lost kids in January. We’ve lost kids at the beginning of the season over the years. It’s never easy. I guess there is some comfort in knowing that you’re not going to be able to count on them. You’re not sitting there waiting, ‘When’s the return date?’ and marking your calendar.
“And players know, there’s no other option than the option sitting in front of us in the locker room. And that’s good. It’s good for the coaching staff because we’re playing with what we have. It’s good for the players because they have to look around the room and say, OK, our goals can’t change, our expectations can’t change, but maybe the way we go about it has to change.”
So what does actually change?
Of course, junior Nika Mühl becomes the primary point guard. Sophomore Azzi Fudd, who also spent much of last season injured, will be viewed — and coached — as one of the best players in America, carrying high expectations as a go-to scorer. UConn has to hope that Lou Lopez Sénéchal, a transfer from Fairfield, can score prolifically in major college basketball like she did in mid-major college basketball. The rotation of post players can’t be as inconsistent as last season. Freshmen will have to prove ready to contribute even while getting acclimated.
The list goes on.
It is a complicated recipe.
UConn is still trying to build what it does every fall — a championship team.
“Everybody keeps telling me, ‘We can’t do it the way we used to do it,’ ” Auriemma said. “And I would say, ‘Well, then how do you get the same things?’ People are people, I guess, and people are different and people have changed and circumstances have changed, whatever you want to say. So if everything has changed, should that follow, that what you can expect has also changed? Or do you think that everything has changed but we’re going to get the exact same results we’ve always gotten? I guess there’s a way to do that. I don’t know who is doing it really, really well.”
In one way, Auriemma’s job is less complicated than it was last season, when he received regular reports on the rehabilitation status of Bueckers and others and hoped they’d return well enough in advance of the postseason. In another way, it’s more complicated, because all that production packed into one player is going to have to be found across the board.
Where can the Huskies draw, say, 35 minutes, 20 points, six assists and five rebounds every game?
“Everything has its pluses and everything has its minuses,” Auriemma said. “Hey, let’s go easy because we’re not as good without Paige. So right away you’re sending a message, we’re not good enough. ‘You don’t trust us, Coach?’ Or, listen, we’re going to have to go twice as hard as we did without Paige. Oh, so now we’re going to kill them to make up for the loss of Paige. So finding that fine line is a real challenge for us as coaches.
“For me, it’s more how do we coach these players to play a role they may not have had to play? So somebody that’s not used to being as much of a ballhandler has to handle the ball more. Somebody who’s not counted on as much to score maybe has to score more. Before Paige got hurt last year, she was averaging 20 a game. So do we need somebody to all of a sudden who was averaging five to get 20 a game? Or does somebody who was averaging 12 now has to start getting 18? And then four people have to do that. I don’t know. But people are going to be pushed and challenged to fill new roles. Sometimes that works great. Other times it takes time. But we have time. That’s the beauty of it. We have plenty of time.”
Auriemma, Dailey, Jamelle Elliott and Morgan Valley all met the media Thursday. Bueckers, effectively, makes Coach No. 5.
Auriemma explained Bueckers’ future by mentioning that there is a new book about Jim Thorpe that he is excited to read.
“Everyone described Jim Thorpe as whatever anybody could do, just give him 15 minutes and he’ll be better at it than anybody else,” Auriemma said. “I think Paige thinks like that. I think she thinks she’s the modern-day version of Jim Thorpe, that no matter what anybody thinks that they can do, she can do it better. So the minute she got hurt, and after her surgery, she said, ‘I’m going to be the best coach on the coaching staff.’ ”
Auriemma has told Bueckers that she can help coaches break down film. There is value in watching a sport she has played for so long. The 2022-23 season won’t be an empty experience for Bueckers.
This is a unique player-coach relationship. For two years now, Auriemma has shaken his head and said jokingly how much Bueckers drives him crazy. They chat constantly, bust chops. They’re both heavy on sarcasm. The playful, sometimes irritating, aspect of their relationship has potential to increase exponentially in the coming months.
“I’m anxious to have her learn more about the game by doing those things, by sitting in practice and watching from a coach’s eyes instead of a player’s eyes,” Auriemma said. “And she’ll be the same Paige she’s always been, though, and she’ll get carried away and she’ll want to do this and she’ll want to do that.
“But I have the ultimate punishment ready for her when she starts to be a pain in the ass. I’m going to have her sit next to CD the whole game. That will be the ultimate punishment. She won’t say a word for the next three months.”