With Paige Bueckers Back, How Far Can UConn Go?
After the Connecticut women's basketball team lost Paige Bueckers in December, and the Huskies returned to the court with a lackluster 44-point effort in a loss to an unranked Georgia Tech team, the Twitter obits proliferated. It seemed there was nothing left to do with this UConn team but bury it.
A funny thing, though: The Huskies had a season that virtually any other program would kill for. That Georgia Tech loss came to ... an NCAA Tournament team! So did the rest of UConn's losses, against Villanova, Oregon and eventual No. 1 seeds Louisville and South Carolina.
A team filled with high-level recruits, coached by Geno Auriemma and Chris Dailey, was going to find its way. But UConn never really lost it. As Auriemma put it last week, following a 70-40 rout of Villanova that gave the Huskies a dose of revenge and a Big East title:
To be clear, we're not living in the time of Breanna Stewart at UConn, where anything close to a loss would have been among the rarest of upsets, especially from her sophomore year on. This is a more limited Huskies group compared with, for instance, the 2016 team, which I would argue is the best of all time.
But two things can be true: This year's UConn squad is an elite team even without Bueckers, and with Bueckers playing like her...