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Paige Bueckers sat to her coach’s left with a towel draped over her shoulders, fighting back tears. He was minutes away from walking off the field at Target Center, just 10 miles from where he grew up, having lost in the national championship to South Carolina. While their coach, Geno Auriemma, was similarly disappointed by the result, he watched for 40 minutes as his team was smothered by the Gamecocks’ swarming defense and overwhelming physicality. he knew very well who was the better team.
Despite making 14 consecutive Final Four appearances, Auriemma sat in a deck chair and said it was hard to predict how next season would go. Still, with his star guard by his side — both literally and figuratively — he remained optimistic.
“I like our chances,” Auriemma said. “Provided we don’t have to have a season like this year — knock on wood — if we stay healthy, I expect to be back here next year.”
Bueckers played in just 17 games as a sophomore due to an injury to the same knee.
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This optimism has already proven too good to be true. On Wednesday, UConn announced that Bueckers suffered a torn ACL in her left knee while playing in a pick-up game (the school did not say where the injury occurred). He will undergo surgery on Friday and miss the upcoming season.
The injury is, of course, a blow to UConn’s chance to win its first title since 2016 and drastically reduces its chances of making 15.u consecutive Final Four. But it is more than that. In December, Bueckers suffered a fractured anterior tibial plateau and a torn lateral meniscus in the same knee she just tore up, by far the most significant injury of her career. He called that injury “catastrophic.” Auriemma used the same word to describe this injury as well.
The same goes for the Huskies and for Bueckers personally — and for college basketball as a whole, which has been dealing with her unparalleled shooting for two seasons and will be without the player with perhaps the smoothest ride in the sport.
“He’s worked really hard to get stronger and healthier this season, and this is an unfortunate setback,” Auriemma he said in a statement. “Paige is obviously an amazing basketball player, but she’s a better person and teammate and it’s really sad that this happened to her.”
During her first two seasons in Storrs, Conn., Bueckers regularly showed why she was among the most popular recruits in recent memory. In her debut, she averaged 20.0 points, 5.7 assists and 4.9 rebounds per game. Sure, she won various freshman of the year awards, but she was also the consensus National Player of the Year.
Then he opened last season looking like the same player. In UConn’s first five games, Bueckers averaged 21 points. Even in the game that ended with the first of two serious left knee injuries, he had scored 22 and had four rebounds and four assists.
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Sophomore guard Azzi Fudd, who has been close friends with Bueckers since the two were 14 and 15, respectively, said watching Bueckers collapse to the floor in the final minute against the Fighting Irish made her heart stop. “I felt sick,” Fud said Sports Illustrated last March. It’s hard to imagine this news being any different.
Bueckers was sidelined for nearly 12 weeks in 2021-22 with that left knee injury. And while she was watching, UConn was struggling. While her absence had the biggest impact on the Huskies’ inconsistent play during the season — their five regular-season losses were the most of any UConn team that played in the national championship in Auriemma’s 37-year tenure — eight of the 12 players of the program missed at least two games due to injury or illness. Eleven different starting lineups were used. “Seeing people doing physical therapy and rehab all the time was kind of discouraging, honestly,” guard Christyn Williams told SI last March. All of which explains why Auriemma was hoping for good health.
Last summer, Bueckers underwent offseason surgery for what the school said was to repair an osteochondral defect in her right ankle. (Osteochondrial defects are described as joint damage involving bone and cartilage.) So this summer, having recovered from her previous knee injury, she was even more eager to take part in practice and improve her game.
Among other aspects, in recent months Bueckers has been open about her desire to become stronger. He told reporters at a recent charity golf outing that he no longer wanted to “jump” adding, “I want to be able to hold my ground and be able to handle whatever any defense throws at me.” Andrea Hudy, UConn director of women’s athletic performance in basketball, recently he said The Athlete that Bueckers has added 10 pounds this offseason.
“It’s so crazy because you work so hard to get back healthy, you feel stronger than ever and you’re playing your best basketball and all of a sudden everything changes,” Bueckers said. he wrote in a statement posted on Instagram.
But this is the new reality for Bueckers, for UConn and for the sport as a whole.
“Some little kid who just tore their ACL or had major surgery might need this story … because it’s going to be one hell of a comeback,” he wrote.
It won’t happen this year. But who can doubt her?
More college basketball coverage:
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• 101 Things That Define Men’s Offseason
• Jada Williams decommits from UCLA, joins Arizona
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