Hey, cut and paste the article... some of us don't have a membership to this newspaper... I'm able to read these articles...and I haven't paid anything. Not sure why others have a problem.
UNCASVILLE — The UConn women’s basketball team suffocated another opponent Sunday afternoon, roughing up Marquette 71-51 in a Big East Tournament semifinal at Mohegan Sun Arena, where the Huskies’ potential is coming into focus through waves of substitutions and a gnarly defensive approach.
Everything looks right for the first time in a long time. UConn has one more piece of neighborhood business to take care of in Monday’s championship game against Villanova but has already slid into a comfortable spot in a national picture shaken up like an Etch A Sketch.
Top-ranked South Carolina lost to Kentucky Sunday, faltering down the stretch of the SEC championship game. No. 6 LSU lost a quarterfinal to Kentucky on Friday, the same day No. 4 Louisville had a complete meltdown in the ACC Tournament, losing at the buzzer by allowing Miami to score the game’s final 17 points.
The thought that South Carolina is clearly on its own level and that UConn, even despite the return of all its players, might even fit somewhere below the next group of contenders, has probably vanished. Because while others with real Final Four and national championship aspirations have gone about showing that this postseason can belong to just about any team, the Huskies have begun to show why there’s no reason it can’t be them.
Considering what this team’s been through — the debilitating injuries, the really flat stretches through stages of self-discovery — do you think Geno Auriemma really cares what seed his team is for the NCAA Tournament or where it plays?
The NCAA’s first “reveal,” an if-the-tournament-started-today snapshot of the bracket, had the Huskies opening in Spokane, Wash. The second one had them down the street in Bridgeport. The third had them in Greensboro, N.C. So by that measure it would stand to reason that on Selection Sunday the Huskies will be placed in Wichita, Kan.
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Whatever. UConn has reached the Final Four 13 tournaments in a row and came out of the region closet to Storrs all 13 times, 12 times as a No. 1 seed.
“You earn your spot, you earn your place,” Auriemma said. “UConn gets this reputation of, they’re always playing close to home. Yeah, well, that tends to happen when you’re undefeated and the No. 1 seed, right? So we earned that. Well, this year, somebody else may have earned it, probably. So wherever they put us, that’s where we’re going. Looking at [this week], I don’t know how much that’s changed. Maybe the teams slated to go wherever they were slated to go are still going to go there, anyway. I just know that wherever they had us three weeks ago, I don’t think they’d have us there anymore.”
Imagine a team that hasn’t even fully reintegrated its best player having the swagger UConn is showing at this point. Paige Bueckers is coming off the bench. She scored two points in 18 minutes Sunday, when the Huskies forced Marquette to miss 21 of its first 24 shots.
The game was all but over by the time she even checked in. The Huskies led 22-6 after the first quarter and 39-18 at halftime, the most recent showcase of a defensive prowess absent during the Huskies last few postseason trips to Mohegan.
“Every single possession [players] feel it’s important to, personally, that you get a stop,” Auriemma said. “I don’t think that’s as easy to do as it sued to be. We used to have a pretty good plan and it worked all the time. We would try to recruit players that could score, and we’ve certainly been successful at that over the years, and we’d bitch at them every minute of every day to play defense. And they did.
“So when you’re got players who can score and they’re willing to commit themselves to play defense that hard, then you start to see some of the stuff you’ve been seeing for X number of years. It’s just that, for a short period of time here recently, it’s been missing. I’ll be the first to admit that this is the closest it has looked, and I feel really good about it.”
UConn held its previous four opponents to under 40 points. Those opponents are not anything like the opponents the Huskies will face in Spokane, Bridgeport, Greensboro or Wichita. But the way the Huskies have intimidated them and worn them down bodes well.
The Huskies held Georgetown to 27.5 percent shooting in Saturday’s quarterfinal. Moving backwards from there, UConn held Providence to 18.2 percent, St. John’s to 26.4, Marquette to 34.7, Georgetown to 32.1, Xavier to 34.0. The last team to shoot better than 40 percent against UConn was Marquette, during the Huskies’ 72-58 victory in Milwaukee on Feb. 13.
Six UConn players played that night. Evina Westbrook was the only player off the bench.
On Sunday, nine players played at least 18 minutes.
“I’ve always felt, despite all their firepower on offense, the most difficult thing is how do you score against them?” said Marquette coach Megan Duffy, who grew familiar with UConn as a player at Notre Dame in 2002-06. “And this year’s team, as they get healthier and have more depth, it only makes it stronger. They’re big. They’re long. They’re physical. They have players on their team who want to defend.”
UConn opponents are feeling the weight of the Huskies’ entire roster, just about. And with each substitution, senior forward Dorka Juhasz said, “You can feel sometimes that they’re getting tired.”
The nation is probably tired of UConn in the Final Four.
There’s no easy path back. But the Huskies are rested and sharp. Everything looks right in early March. The NCAA Tournament is wide open.
“There are some teams that have proven to be that good,” Auriemma said. “South Carolina being one, N.C. State being another, Stanford being another, and Louisville to a certain extent. Then there are some teams that people don’t talk about that much that are probably going to surprise a lot of people in the tournament. Usually, it’s pretty predictable, in some ways. … There’s this perception that the same teams are going to be there, and this may be one of those years where a lot of people get surprised.”
Written By
Mike Anthony
