STORRS — Fair or unfair, the UConn women’s basketball team gets only a handful of chances to define its regular season.
On the other side of the Werth Family Center, the men’s team gets what sometimes seems like nine lives. Lose three in Hawaii, there’s the opportunity to repair the damage before conference play. Lose to Xavier or St. John’s? Bounce right back with signature road wins at Marquette and Creighton.
The landscape of the women’s game, though getting more crowded with real contenders, is not quite there yet. Geno Auriemma’s Huskies, after losing to a ranked team, usually has to wait weeks while wading through a series of nondescript Big East opponents to get another chance.
So the game at South Carolina Sunday at 1 p.m., while not win or go home, has certain ramifications. It will give the Huskies a truer picture of what they are now, but not necessarily who or what they will become. That’s the tale here.
“The only games that really, really, really, really matter are the games where if you lose you have no games left,” Auriemma said Friday after practice. “Everything else? Yeah, who doesn’t want to play great? Who doesn’t want to win? The object is to do both, play really well, win the game … and move on.”
UConn (23-3), ranked seventh, has lost to Notre Dame, Southern California and Tennessee, all ranked teams, all games, like this next one, with huge audiences. As a result the Huskies currently wear the national perception that the very top of the sport, the zenith they have reached 11 times and to which they always aspire, is beyond their reach right now.
This game, against the fourth-ranked Gamecocks, the defending champs, is one last chance this regular season for UConn to stamp itself, or restamp itself as the real deal — but only in terms of perceptions. Seeding for the NCAA Tournament is all that is really at stake on Sunday.
“I try not to go down that road,” Auriemma said. “I’ve seen so many times, last year being one of them, at one time we were 4-3 and all three losses were to real good teams. And you run the risk of, ‘Well, that’s who we are.’ Well, that’s who we are at that point in time. You can’t change the league you’re in, you can’t change your schedule, so to me I see these games more as opportunities. These are great opportunities. What will they mean in the long run? That I don’t know.”
With so few opportunities of this type, and none in conference play, it becomes easy to forget the real objective of the regular season is to position the team to play its best basketball in March and April.
There are stories behind every regular-season game that might not be valid come March Madness. When UConn lost at Notre Dame, Azzi Fudd was out. Against Southern Cal, Fudd was in her first game back. In the game at Tennessee, the bench was limited by the loss of Ice Brady, who will not be back for this game. Morgan Cheli, a key bench player, is also out.
In none of the losses did UConn shot the 3-pointer well.
The Huskies do, however, go into this game with Fudd on a hot streak, Aubrey Griffin starting to look like her game-changing self again and Paige Bueckers, perhaps, hungry to tear to shreds the idea that she can’t perform in these games the way she did as a freshman and sophomore. Other players, such as KK Arnold, have roles that are evolving.
UConn is 14-0 in conference play, the average margin of victory is 34.2 points. That means just what it appears to mean: very little. That makes high-caliber nonconference games this late in the year so vital.
This game in Columbia will hold up a truer mirror for Auriemma and his coaches and players.
“It shows you what your warts are,” he said, “what your faults are, what our strengths are. If you try to make it way more than that, your players start to question themselves, doubt themselves. Same if you win. You get that euphoria, ‘Now nobody can touch us.’ That can be just as bad. So I try to keep it real for them.”
South Carolina (23-2) faces more tests in the SEC, and still goes out of conference for more. They’ve lost only to UCLA and Texas.
Dom Amore: Joey Muldowney shooting UConn hockey toward new horizons, NCAA berth
“I think they have bigger fish to fry than beating UConn,” Auriemma said earlier in the week. But this is still a big fish for Dawn Staley, because there is still a big drop off once out of the top 10 or 12 teams.
It may not be the last time UConn and South Carolina face each other this year. It would be win or go home next time, but not this time. The season will not end for either team on Sunday.
But as the nature of things suggests, it just may feel that way for a while.
“Coming out of games where you are really challenged, it puts the mirror up in front of your face,” Auriemma said. “You can go home and pretend you don’t see that picture in the mirror of who you are, or you can say, ‘Man, if we don’t fix this, if we don’t address this now, you’re not going to be able to fix it come March.’ So every one of these games is a mirror to your face … but it can’t be more than that.”
.
