Dom Amore: Refs whistled away UConn women’s last shot, but season can be remembered for the best reasons
For a moment, let’s focus on two images apart from the moment that’s going to stick in Connecticut craws for a long time.
Let’s choose first to remember Nika Muhl limping off the court and through the tunnel with 2:34 left in the third quarter, then suddenly stopping and saying no. No, it would not end this way. After all the injuries the UConn women’s basketball team has had to overcome, they were now going to deny an injury, as if to will it out of existence. Muhl was convinced to go back to the locker room, at a moment when KK Arnold picked up her fourth foul and it looked like the Huskies were sunk.
But Muhl, the warrior among warriors, came back a few moments later and finished the game, and nearly turned it back UConn’s way, stealing the ball and finding Paige Bueckers for a 3-pointer that began one more comeback.
“You saw the epitome of what Nika is,” Paige Bueckers said, “a tenacious defender, does everything this team needs her to do, controls the offense, plays with so much heart and energy, and plays with her whole soul.”
Late foul call costs UConn as Huskies fall to Iowa, 71-69, in national semifinals
Let’s choose, too, to remember Arnold slapping the ball away and gaining possession for UConn with 10.8 seconds left, giving the Huskies the chance to win, the chance to set up a screen for Bueckers to take a potential game-winning shot.
Those images represent what this 2023-24 UConn team was, and why these players captured hearts as much as any of their illustrious predecessors. These Huskies never backed down, no matter the odds and forces arrayed against them, never believed they needed a miracle to do what other considered miraculous, win a championship with six of 14 scholarship player lost to injuries.
The poetic ending, a winning shot from Paige Bueckers, appeared inevitable, and then the whistle was blown on the whole fairy tale. An illegal screen was called on Aaliyah Edwards with 3.9 seconds left, and, though there was a little suspense left at the foul line at the other end, that was the empty ending Friday night in Cleveland, the 71-69 loss to Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the national semifinal.
“I don’t know if I can say this on TV,” ESPN analyst Andraya Carter told host Scott Van Pelt in the aftermath. “But that called sucked.”
She said it on TV, and Carter could say that again. In your heart, you know she was right. In your heart of hearts, you may remember a missed foul call broke in UConn’s favor in a Regional final against Baylor in 2021. And deep down, you must remember, as Bueckers pointed out, that a basketball game has hundreds of plays, some 2,400 seconds, and when it comes down to the razor’s edge there are dozens, maybe 100 things that happened earlier, missed open shots, missed free throws, turnovers, that could have brought a different result.
This is basketball, this is sports, this is life. The official made a call that, in the opinion of many, from Lebron James to Kelsey Plum, and including me, should not have been made at that point of a game of this magnitude. Edwards was moving instead of being set, but the infraction appeared to have no real effect on the play, nothing blatant, and this time the chance for one of the game’s great players to take a do-or-die shot was taken away.
“There’s probably an illegal screen call that you could make on every single possession,” Geno Auriemma said, haltingly, biting his tongue. “I just know there were three or four of them called on us and I don’t think there were any called on them. So I guess we’ve just got to get better on not setting illegal screens.”
Dom Amore: In triumph of coaching and spirit, UConn women return to Final Four
In an NCAA Tournament that brought women’s basketball and its generational stars center stage and attracted a huge audience, those generational players did not get to decide its outcome. It’s an age old concept: audiences, in this case record-setting numbers, haven’t been turning in to see that officials were calling moving screens correctly.
Yes, that part of it stinks. Auriemma and the UConn players took the high road at the podium, and only earned more admiration for it.
“You can look at one play and say, ‘oh, that killed us or that hurt us,'” Bueckers said. “But we should have done a better job, I should have done a better job of making sure we didn’t leave the game up to chance like that and leave the game up to one bad call going our way and that deciding it.”
“Yeah, maybe that was a tough call for us, but I feel like I could have done a better job preventing that from even happening.”
But now that it’s done and it’s time to move on, the pain can be dulled with pride and healed with time to reflect on what the team accomplished, bobbing, weaving, jabbing, fighting, clawing it’s way to the end of the season, through the Big East season and conference tournament undefeated, through an NCAA Tournament with only seven players, six that Auriemma trusted enough to play, and came within a shot, a bounce or a swallowed whistle from getting to the championship game.
The officials made a call and can take whatever criticism comes of it. The Huskies gave their all, and deserve the highest praise for it.
In this decisive game, the Huskies hounded basketball’s all-time leading scorer, Clark, throughout. She scored six points and the Hawkeyes only 26 in the first half, turning it over 12 times. The kind of defense it took for UConn to do that could not be sustained, the foul trouble was inevitable, as was the fatigue and Clark’s ability to heat up. Indeed, Iowa cut a 12-point UConn lead down to six in the final minute of the half, and in the third quarter alone Iowa scored 25 and didn’t turn the ball over at all.
And this is where the game really slipped from UConn’s control. The notion that Clark is simply prolific scorer was shown to be untrue, she had seven assists, finding teammates as Muhl and Arnold kept trying to guard her as aggressively as possible without fouling. And she shook loose to score 21 points, just enough, her surge helping her team surge to a nine-point lead with 5:42 left to play.
Again, the Huskies appeared spent and done. Again, they fought back. Edwards stole the ball, Ashlynn Shade hit a three and hopes were flickering. Muhl’s steal and 3-pointer made it a one-point game with 49 seconds to go, and Arnold made her steal and there it was. The epic game everyone envisioned when Bueckers and Clark faced off materialized, the legendary ending did not.
Instead, it was an ending and a game that will be remembered for the wrong reasons, but a team and a season that will be remembered for all the best reasons.
“I’m going to leave this game with being proud of the team and proud of how we, game in, game out, just continued to believe in each other and lean on one another,” Edwards said. “And unfortunately we just didn’t leave this game with a W, but we fought hard up until the very end. Yeah, there were some decisions that, even myself, I wish I could take back. But that’s just how the game went. And we left it out there on the court today.”
Muhl and Edwards are finished with college ball, but Paige Bueckers will be back, most of her teammates will be back next season and, though this has been said before, the terrible injury luck is bound to change. The hearts of lions and champions will beat to fight on other days.
But that call? That final blow for this UConn team and season? … Yeah, that’s hard to swallow.
