STORRS, Conn. — The eerie silence was broken when Nika Mühl sat up and was helped to her feet. Then there was only clapping as Geno Auriemma and athletic trainer Janelle Francisco each took a shoulder and helped her take one step at a time.
Paige Bueckers, a few months into her recovery from knee surgery, moved out and relieved the coach, taking the left arm and helping Mühl, who had fallen and hit her head first on Aaliyah Edwards’ knee and then on the floor, to her seat on the bench, where she’d join Bueckers, Azzi Fudd, Ice Brady and Dorka Juhász.
So this is what it has come to for the UConn women’s basketball team: one injured player helping another off the court. Strange times. Trying times. There was 17:07 left to play and the UConn women’s basketball team was ahead of Princeton by 11 points on “throw-back night.”
Old-school uniforms were worn. Carla Berube, decorated member of the 1995 championship team, was back on campus coaching Princeton, and her old teammate Jen Rizzotti was in the crowd, moving from behind one bench to the other, like a president at the Army-Navy game. One could throw back decades and not remember a night quite like this one at Gampel.
It ended with a 69-64 UConn win and the opposing coach, proud as she was of her own team, admitting she was actually proud of the Huskies, too, for hanging on, “which is kind of a weird dynamic inside,” Berube said.
Weird dynamics were everywhere once Mühl, the ultimate glue player, who was well on her way to another game of double-digit assists, left the game. Soon after she was joined by Lou Lopez-Sénéchal, whose foot has been giving her trouble.
The Huskies didn’t have an experienced ball-handler out there, and Berube, who was 132-8 as a player at UConn and has won 81.3% of her games as coach at Tufts and Princeton, knew exactly what to do. Press, press and press some more. The Huskies turned it over 17 times after Mühl left and the Tigers cut a 15-point UConn lead down to two, and had a couple of chances to tie at the end.
“If you’d have said to me that you need to prepare to have this lineup for the last three minutes of a game,” Auriemma said. “I’d have said, ‘That’s not possible.’”
Amid the chaos, Aubrey Griffin played the game of her life: 29 points, on 11-for-11 shooting from the floor, a performance equaled only by Rebecca Lobo at UConn, and 5-for-6 shooting from the line, plus 10 rebounds. Every time the Huskies had to have a basket, she got it. To win with this lineup, Auriemma said, Griffin will have to play this way every game. (OK, maybe an occasional miss can be absorbed.)
“I definitely do embrace it,” Griffin said. “I’m just going to do what I can do to help my team win. ... Coach actually said he didn’t think any other team could pull through what we did tonight.”
Amari DeBerry played 29 minutes and held down the fort. And wide-eyed freshman Inês Bettencourt, who arrived in August from the Azores, found herself at center stage, at the free-throw line to win or lose the game.
“She’s getting baptism by fire, right?” Auriemma said. “I don’t think they have this kind of stuff in the Azores. The kid’s never been in a situation like this in her life.”
Associate head coach Chris Dailey likes to play “guess the attendance” with young players. When she asked Bettencourt to guess what the crowd at an XL Center game would be, she naively blurted out “fifty thousand.” There were 8,731 at Gampel, but there might as well have been 50,000.
“The biggest crowd [before coming to UConn] was the European championship, it must have been like 200,” Bettencourt said, as her teammates laughed. “Back on my island there was like 70, 50 people. It was not a lot. ... When Nika got hurt, I felt like I just had to help the team get the ball to the other side of the floor, and ...”
Bettencourt stopped, so Lopez-Sénéchal, the grad student, finished the answer like a big sister: “And she did well. For a freshman, it’s very new for her, but we can see the improvement. In those moments, she proved she can be in the game and still have an impact.”
Bettencourt played nine minutes. She started with a foul Auriemma didn’t like, but she drove to the basket and scored what could have been a killer basket that was reversed to a shot-clock violation on replay. She made 3 of 4 from the line over the last 21 seconds, sinking two with two seconds left to finally let everyone on the UConn side breathe. During that stretch, when UConn was having so much trouble inbounding, she correctly ran hard to the ball to break the pressure.
“She’s not afraid,” Auriemma said. “She’s not smart yet, but she’s not afraid. I can probably fix the one, but I can’t make you not afraid.”
As the smart, tough Tigers, the best the Ivy League has to offer, got closer and closer, there was fear in Gampel, fear that UConn’s 29-year record of avoiding back-to-back losses would end under these dire circumstances. It didn’t and when it was over Auriemma gave Berube a hug and reminder she was a hell of a coach.
You might call this a pyrrhic victory; more such nights and sixth-ranked UConn (7-1), or at least the long streak, could be undone with a road game at Maryland on Sunday, and a game vs. Florida State at Mohegan Sun on Dec. 18. Maybe Mühl will avoid a lengthy protocol, maybe Juhász’s thumb will be sufficiently healed, maybe Lopez-Sénéchal can score through her pain or Caroline Ducharme, with her nagging neck issue, can have better days and avoid foul trouble.
Oh, these are strange times for UConn. Trying times. And it will take creativity, and belief, to pull through in the short term.
“You look at our bench, and every [injured] kid on our bench is someone we count on to score points,” Auriemma said. “And now you’re going to have a team on the floor where the one thing they don’t think they’re comfortable with is scoring points, and I don’t know how we can win without shooting, scoring. So it’s not about X’s and O’s, it’s about the mindset that all of a sudden they’re going to have to acquire.
“As a coaching staff, yeah, we’ll be able to put something together for how we’re going to attack Maryland and how we’re going to defend them, but can we get our team to believe that we’re going to score enough points given who we have sitting on the bench? That’s going to be a tough sell. ... But then again, kids surprise you. Hopefully they’ll surprise us.”
