What began as a season with expectations of a UConn women’s basketball renaissance is looking more like the trip into a the wilderness.
The Huskies have rarely looked as lost as they did in the Cayman Islands Classic on Friday night. UCLA, ranked No. 2 in the latest poll, led wire to wire and dealt the latest blow to UConn’s prestige, winning 78-67.
The Bruins (5-0), who struggled to beat Princeton earlier in the week, came to the Caribbean with a purpose, to beat UConn for the first time after seven losses dating back to 1998. They rained 3-pointers in the first quarter, starting the game with a 10-0 run and built a 19-point lead, then after UConn got as close as three near the end of the first half, dominated the third and blew the game apart. They out-shot, out-rebounded and out-performed the sixth-ranked Huskies in just about every area.
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Charisma Osborne, who hit seven 3-pointers the last time UCLA played UConn, went 6 for 10 on threes Friday night and scored 18 points, but six different players hit threes for the Bruins, who were 12 for 25. Kiki Rice led the Bruins with a career high 24 points, and Lauren Betts had 13 points and seven rebounds.
UConn (3-2), almost unfathomably, missed 13 of its first 14 shots from the floor in the second half and fell completely out of the game. Paige Bueckers led the Huskies with 31 points, hitting 5 of 11 on threes, but she couldn’t carry the Huskies alone against this caliber of opponent. Aubrey Griffin scored 11.
Aaliyah Edwards, 2 for 12 before fouling out, struggled all night to score against UCLA’s big front court.
“You can’t beat a really good team with one player,” coach Geno Auriemma told reporters after the game at John Gray Gymnasium, his postgame remarks aired on i-Heart radio. “It was disappointing that we didn’t get more contributions from more people. Our combinations are all screwed up right now, so that’s got to get sorted out.. We struggled, we had our runs, we just didn’t have enough.”
Geno on radio postgame: “You can’t beat a really good team with one player. It was disappointing that we didn’t get more contributions from more people. Our combinations are all screwed up right now, so that’s gotta get sorted out.”
“We just didn’t have enough.”
— Daniel Connolly (@DanielVConnolly) November 25, 2023
UConn plays unranked Kansas in the second game of the showcase on Saturday night at 7 p.m. The Jayhawks lost 59-58 to No.9 Virginia Tech in the early game Friday.
The Bruins, though they had a size advantage, came out firing from the perimeter, hitting 5 of 7 on 3-point attempts in the first quarter, roaring out to a 28-10 lead. Osborne started the second quarter with yet another to to extend UCLA’s lead to 19 points. The Huskies, who started freshman KK Arnold in place of injured Caroline Ducharme, and with Azzi Fudd missing, as she will be the rest of the season, were again disjointed on offense, missing 17 of their first 22 shots from the floor, shooting only 33 percent for the game.
“Basically, UCLA defended one player and was content to let anyone else have any shot they wanted and they didn’t make any,” Auriemma said. “… Other people are going to have to step up and have to make shots. We have to find a way to get some sort of cohesiveness on offense, we look disjointed a lot of times. I’ve got to fix that.”
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Bueckers, in this scenario, was carrying the scoring load, but forced to take a lot of shots to do it. The Huskies began to get her some help and hack, rather than chip, away at the deficit as UCLA inevitably cooled off; Bueckers’ jumper finished an 11-2 run, cutting it to 33-21. A 3-pointer from Griffin, her first of the year, then a steal and score by Griffin pulled UConn within seven.
“The way Aubrey played for long stretches in that game, that’s how she’s got to start the game,” Auriemma said. “Aubrey needs to do it before we get down 15 points. That’s the issue with some of our players, they just take a long time to get going.”
Two free throws, and a 3-pointer from Bueckers completed a 13-0 spurt and made it a three-point game, 37-34.
Bueckers finished the half with 18 points, her team down 39-34, and notable was Amari DeBerry, though she didn’t get any stats, making an impact on the game with hustle plays during her six minutes in the second quarter. But the Huskies got only three points from their bench the entire game, a 3-point shot from Ashlynn Shade.
UCLA re-established its 3-point game and started the second half with an 8-0 run to restore its lead to double digits as Aaliyah Edwards, struggling to hit from the floor at 1-for-11, picked up her third foul with 6:49 to go in the third quarter. The Bruins dominated the rest of the quarter and built their lead all the way out to 23 on Kiki Rice’s bucket with 2:20 left in the third. UConn’s offense completely broke down.
The Huskies again rallied furiously in the fourth quarter, getting as close as 10, but UCLA closed it out.
With Fudd and Jana El-Afly out for the season, and Ducharme out with recurring neck problems and Ayanna Patterson still recovering from off-season knee surgery, the Huskies had 10 healthy scholarship players. Auriemma, too, is concerned about the burden Bueckers is carrying this soon after recovering from her major knee surgery.
“You have to perform,” Auriemma said. “When you play here, you have to know you’re getting other people’s best shots. When you play these tournaments, you know you’re going to have two tough games back to back. We set it (our schedule) like that for a reason. Unfortunately, this isn’t the team I thought we’d come down here with. It puts a lot of pressure on the other players and we’ve got to figure it a way to do it.”
