FORT WORTH, Texas — On Geno Auriemma’s 25th trip to the Final Four, perhaps the NCAA has finally learned this: UConn doesn’t cut the nets until the national championship. So don’t bother bringing a ladder and ceremonial scissors onto the floor at the regional championships. They will go untouched. It will be someone else’s wasted efforts and the Huskies won’t even bother to look at them.
Last season, it stood on the floor in Spokane Region as the loneliest championship ladder in the world until someone mercifully pulled it from the floor. On Sunday, luckily no one in Fort Worth perched it under the not-to-be cut nets after No. 1 seed UConn beat No. 6 seed Notre Dame 70-52 to advance to the Final Four.
Because in UConn’s world, Elite Eight wins are not to be celebrated so much as they are to be survived. There is an inherent anxiety that comes with these games — Auriemma knows better than most — and the margin between the most catastrophic ending to the season ever (a loss in the Elite Eight) and a really good year (advancing to the Final Four), when it comes to this stage, comes down to 40 minutes.
This specific path to the Final Four for UConn was one that included more than a few trip hazards, most notably, and recently, Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo, a player that Auriemma will impress upon you is the best point guard in the country. Not one of them.
Against the Huskies, Hidalgo finished with 22 points, 11 rebounds, three assists, three steals and at least a thousand heart palpitations caused as UConn players on every possession peeked over their shoulders anxiously searching for the 5-foot-6 player whose speed and quickness has worked as an invisibility shield for unsuspecting passers.
“She probably causes more problems for your offense than any player in the country,” Auriemma said. “You can deal with a shot blocker. You can deal with that, but you cannot deal with someone that every time you’re dribbling the ball, you’re more worried about where she is than who you are passing it to.”
For the first half of the game, UConn couldn’t solve that Hidalgo problem. The nation’s best passing team finished the first 20 minutes with more turnovers than assists, and its two best players — Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd — were held to a combined 10 points, a season low for the duo.
But because this is the machine Auriemma built and because this particular team’s strength is its depth — yes, even on a team with the nation’s top player, its strength is something other than the country’s best player — the Huskies had options.
With Fudd and Strong stalled, freshman Blanca Quiñonez filled the void early. She scored 12 points in the first quarter alone, and ended the game with 20 points, eight rebounds and three assists. Like great freshmen of the past, it’s clear Auriemma has a special bond with Quiñonez, not least of which is that she’s fluent in Italian having played professionally in Italy for five years before entering UConn. Though Auriemma, who immigrated from Italy to the U.S. as a child, prefers to yell at her in English, he will occasionally pull out a, “Firma la tirare!” (“Stop shooting the ball!”) in Italian.
When Auriemma talks about Quiñonez’s freshman season, he says it’s like a compilation of players like Diana Taurasi, Svetlana Abrosimova and Nika Mühl. When she has big games, people will ask him: When’s the last time a freshman did what Blanca did?
He can hardly remember most times.
But when it comes to the way she played in this Elite Eight game, the answer is sitting in his locker room: Strong. Twice last year she finished with at least 20 points, seven boards and three assists in the Elite Eight or better. Breanna Stewart did that once. But those are the only players to ever do that as freshmen. Not exactly bad company.
And that’s what makes this UConn team a nightmare to opponents. Shut down Strong and Fudd, and then there’s Quiñonez. Manage to slow her down, and Auriemma has other options on the bench. Maybe they’re not all All-Americans, but they’re all problems for opponents. There’s Kayleigh Heckel, a defensive headache who manages to make some circus shot at least once a game, or Jana El-Alfy, a 6-5 center who started in the national title game a season ago and, because of the Huskies’ depth this season, has averaged less than 12 minutes a game. When the offense stalled early in the game, Auriemma brought in Allie Ziebell for a spell. The sophomore shoots 39 percent from beyond the arc and casually tied the program record by hitting 10 triples in a single game earlier this season.
And even though none of those players came in and blew the roof off the place, what they did was buy the Huskies enough time for Strong and Fudd to settle in and find their games. Because the greats, as Auriemma who has coached so many of them knows, might have an off quarter or two, but they’re not going to be down for full games. Depth buys you versatility and time, but talented depth is a separator. And UConn’s depth this season is the latter.
Ultimately, Strong finished with 21 points and seven rebounds while Fudd ended the day with 13 points and four assists.
“That’s the challenge you have with that team,” Ivey said. “You have players coming off the bench that can start anywhere else. When your starting five is that solid, but you also have a lot of bodies coming off the bench, it’s difficult.”
Auriemma can empathize. His job in practice is to make life as difficult for his team as possible, so he understands the challenges of game planning against the Huskies.
Through the regular season, the Huskies averaged a nearly 40-point win margin. They played the toughest nonconference schedule in the country to prepare for a national title run, but night-in and night-out their schedule didn’t look like that of most power conference teams in January and February. So, Auriemma’s job is to create the chaos the Huskies will see in March through his own practices. He will get creative, throwing eight defensive players at his team, a nearly impossible and clogged puzzle to solve, and his squad — unfazed — will attack with abandon. He’ll come up with impossible scenarios, and they’ll stare back just waiting for him to blow the whistle so they can begin.
It’s the calm nature of this team that he loves, and yet, he also scratches his head as he looks at them and thinks: This group, really? This team is the one that has carried an undefeated season?
They’re just so — and he says this not sure how he really feels about it — nice.
He has had 25 teams advance to the Final Four. He has had 11 teams, including this one, complete undefeated seasons. A lot of those teams had attitude and swagger. They had edges. This one leaves him wondering, maybe a bit more than the others … how?
“They’re not good enough to be doing this in a sense,” Auriemma said. “Because we have three kind of high-level scorers, right? And then we have a bunch of (players) who they do their little part, and then it all comes together, and we win.”
To the point of being not good enough to do this, Ivey (and almost every other coach in the country) might disagree. UConn is very, very good this year. The Huskies have depth, and either because of or despite their niceness, they’ve weathered the challenges and pressures that come with being undefeated and headed to the Final Four.
There, they’ll meet greater expectations. Because as much as the goal was to get over the hump and have a “really good” season by advancing to the Final Four, this is still UConn — a program that wants to not only hang banners, but also cut nets.
And there’s only one place to do that.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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