On championship quest, UConn’s Paige Bueckers and Geno Auriemma bring out best in each other

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SPOKANE, Wash. — When Paige Bueckers and Geno Auriemma sat down at the dais after punching their ticket to Tampa for the Final Four, Auriemma pointed to the box score on a sheet of paper. Not to the fact that she played all 40 minutes or scored a game-high 31 points. Not to her 50 percent shooting from beyond the 3-point line or her nine fouls drawn or her two blocks or her six assists.

He pointed to her four turnovers and shook his head. “What was that?” he asked her.

She quickly pointed to the column next over from the turnovers — a game-high four steals.

“Look,” she said. “I got it back. I got four steals.”

He laughed because he knew she wasn’t wrong (though he likely wouldn’t go as far to say she was right). Bueckers got back plenty in that game for herself and her teammates, smoothed over the rough patches and was the player who, whenever Auriemma was too deep into the team’s mistakes, could draw him back.

“Her mentality is always: This is what I did to help us win. I’m not worried about what the other stuff was,” Auriemma said. “I’ve admired that in her forever.”

The 24th Final Four for Geno Auriemma and the Huskies pic.twitter.com/RIeI1I74dX

— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) April 1, 2025

In that way, Bueckers is very much the yin to Auriemma’s yang. He’s a coach who has famously made his career on preparing for the worst-case scenario. Once, after completing one of the Huskies’ six undefeated seasons, he spent the bus ride back to campus (with a national championship trophy in tow), trying to figure out what went wrong so they could be even better the next year. While he can tell you all the ways a game could’ve or should’ve or did almost go to hell in a handbasket, it’s Bueckers — the perpetual optimist — who reminds him that UConn passed that exit on the expressway long ago and ended up somewhere better.

On Monday night, Bueckers’ performance — yes, including those turnovers — was still good enough for a path to Tampa. And, for the 24th time in Auriemma’s career and the fourth in Bueckers’, UConn is headed to the Final Four.

UConn players threw confetti at one another as they hugged family and friends, but there was no major pomp and circumstance for the occasion, no exaggerated celebration after UConn beat USC 78-64 in the Elite Eight. A team staff member performed the ceremonial task of sticking the UConn sticker to the 10-foot poster of the bracket that shows which team is moving forward to the Final Four. The ladders and scissors brought out to cut down the nets sat unused until finally two arena employees were told to take them down and store them in the backroom next to some unopened wooden crates. They carted them off and shimmied them behind two back-up baskets. UCLA, which had cut down the nets the night before for the program’s first Final Four appearance in the NCAA era, had requested that one ladder be shipped back to Westwood. But UConn doesn’t cut down the nets for a Final Four win.

Perhaps, the optimists in them believe there are even better nets to retrieve somewhere down the road. It has been a tradition in the program long enough that not even Auriemma, who could tell you about a recruit he missed out on in 1993, can’t even remember its exact origins.

This is the world he has helped create at UConn, with an assist from players like Bueckers. He jokes that there’s Disneyland, Disney World and UConn — all fantasy lands where things that don’t make sense still happen. Like 16 Final Fours in 17 years. In the one year in the past 17 that the Huskies didn’t advance to the Final Four, he went to the men’s tournament instead. Sat in the stands. Cheered for the UConn men’s team. Initially, he enjoyed that he didn’t feel the stress of the coaches on the sidelines losing their minds over missed calls and mistakes. He could separate himself from the hunt for that title.

Then he realized how much he missed it. How much he wanted to believe that he could still help all of his players feel the way those players on the court felt, still go on the ride with them to a place where he could pace on a sideline and cut down nets at the end of the road.

It’s why Bueckers came to UConn. To go to Final Fours and to win national championships. She has accomplished the former, but not yet the latter. Auriemma hasn’t said it out loud, but it seems obvious how badly he wants this one for Bueckers. When he handed off the regional championship trophy to her and the fellow seniors after beating USC, there was a sense that there was still so much more to come even though the finish line is in sight. But there’s still one more trophy that Bueckers has never held.

He knows what it takes to get there. He’s been there 11 times.

National titles take at least one (but sometimes more than one) player who has it. A player who shoulders the load and controls the team’s potential. A player who must show up.

Bueckers is that for this team.

She knows she can because she is the optimist. And he knows she can because he has spent five years pointing out all the turnovers and mistakes and downfalls in her game. Amid her own struggles — seasons derailed by injuries and a pandemic bubble tournament, moments in which she questioned why the chips never seemed to fall her way — she has remained relentlessly positive, still continuing to balance Auriemma.

Drop the confetti pic.twitter.com/V7bsSNPcLW

— UConn Women’s Basketball (@UConnWBB) April 1, 2025

Nearly 40 years into his UConn career, he can rattle off the players who have made an extra mark on not only the program but on him. When he became the winningest coach in college basketball in November, a few of those players — Maya Moore, Sue Bird, Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi — spoke after the game.

The game is different now, and the world around the game is entirely changed. Auriemma has remained himself within it, but he’s also different. He’s older now, and at some point in the last decade — he can’t point to exactly when — he went from feeling like his players were his kids, to feeling like they were his grandkids.

He has watched as Bueckers has navigated the world of NIL and increasing fame in women’s college basketball. It’s an exact landscape with unexpected hurdles that no one else he has ever coached has had to deal with, and he saw Bueckers do it with grace while continuing to elevate the program — a nearly impossible task given the expectations of perfection that he helped establish in Storrs.

“For her to get all the attention she gets, have all the demands on her life, all the expectations in her life, and still be able to deliver?” Auriemma said after the win over USC. “I thought she was a unique individual when I saw her in high school. … I think she’s closer to (number) one or two or three of most unique players I’ve ever coached.”

For Auriemma, the opportunity to finally cut down nets with Bueckers doesn’t just mean that she would win a national championship. It means two more games with her, 80 more minutes of coaching a player who — every time he would rail on someone for messing up — would be the one to pull him back from the edge, reminding him, “Nah, they can do this. They’re really good at this.”

“She always sees the best in everybody,” Auriemma said. “Refreshing.”

As he sat at the dais on Monday night, after she had returned to the locker room to celebrate with her teammates, he went on about the person she has been for the program. He threw in jabs because he is Auriemma; how could he not?

But then he leaned into the microphone.

“I’m really going to miss her,” he said with a smirk, catching himself. “I can’t say that out loud.”

Perhaps they still have more road to travel together — 80 more minutes of gametime and a final trip up a ladder. There is still more to win, and because Bueckers is Bueckers, she believes she can. And because Auriemma has spent enough time around her over the past five years, one has to think he believes she isn’t wrong.

(Photo of Paige Bueckers and Geno Auriemma: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)

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