College BasketballCollege BasketballUConn’s star didn’t channel Caitlin Clark to finally reach the mountaintop. She did it her way, leading her Huskies to a national title whose arrival wasn’t always clear.
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By Seerat SohiApril 7, 1:25 pm UTC • 6 min
Five years in Storrs. Four Final Fours. Three years of heartbreak. Two that ended in major injuries. And finally, at last, one national title.
In her final game in a UConn Huskies uniform, Paige Bueckers is walking away a champion, finding peace in a process that ended in the sweetest result: a team-powered, end-to-end 82-59 rout over South Carolina on Sunday that vindicated her unselfish ethos.
UConn whipped the ball all over the floor in the title clash, finishing with 18 assists on 30 field goals. Bueckers totaled just 17 points, while Azzi Fudd—who took home the Final Four Most Outstanding Player award—and freshman sensation Sarah Strong poured in 24 each.
“It’s been a story of resilience, of gratitude, of adversity, of overcoming adversity and responding to life’s challenges,” said Bueckers, the former National Player of the Year, who finished her career with the third-most points in NCAA women’s tournament history. “Trying to fuel them to make me a better person, a better player, and grow in my leadership abilities, being a great teammate and standing firm in who I am.”
Standing firm became her mantra in a season when she battled self-doubt. Bueckers, a multi-positional two-way threat with few holes in her game, had long played like a selfless supercomputer, churning out the most efficient basketball decisions possible, regardless of acclaim. She led the country in both assists and effective field goal percentage twice. But after last year’s loss to Iowa in the Final Four, her deferent nature came under fire, contrasted negatively with the fearless chutzpah of Caitlin Clark, who, in a flash of intuition, infamously bounced the ball off Bueckers’s back on an inbounds play that ended UConn’s season. Fans, commentators, trolls, and even her coach had the same message: Be more selfish. Shoot. Take control. Bueckers internalized it, telling The Ringer’s Mirin Fader: “I’ve always tried to find the happy medium, but I think for now, and forever, for the rest of my career, I have to put killer first.”
But even coach Geno Auriemma struggled with his new mandate for Paige, sounding concerned after she had to carry UConn against North Carolina early in the season. The reality, in losses against USC and Notre Dame, crystallized: Great defenses would find a way to limit Bueckers, and the Huskies, who have won more titles than any team in NCAA history on a foundation of orchestrated movement, looked too disjointed early in the season to answer that problem. This wasn’t UConn basketball. It wasn’t Paige.
On top of that, working against her values in hopes of becoming the player other people wanted her to be only dragged her down. Game days began to fill her with anxiety, she told ESPN’s Alexa Philippou. Bueckers and UConn needed a different answer to the riddle of her battle with perfectionism. At Auriemma’s urging, Bueckers started to see a sports psychologist, who helped her find gratitude and meaning in the moment—its struggles, triumphs, and obstacles—as she embarked on her final season of college play.
“The dinners, the lunches, going back to our rooms and ordering dessert together, hanging out on the rooftop, playing Ping-Pong, sitting in the sauna suffering together because we’re so hot, or sitting in the cold tub crying because it’s so cold,” Bueckers said before the Final Four. “Every single part of it, I just enjoy. And I’m gonna miss everything.”
Over time, her evolution became less about changing how she played and more about changing how she thought. “Last year, I got so caught up in the pressures and stakes of it all,” she said. “I was so worried about all that could go wrong, but you can’t even do anything right when I’m so focused on all that could go wrong.”
In hindsight, Bueckers took the wrong lesson away from the Iowa loss. It wasn’t an indictment of her game. It was a testament to her capabilities as a floor raiser that a UConn team decimated by injuries made it as far as the Final Four with a six-player rotation. She didn’t need to dominate the ball or think “shoot first” to get there. In fact, she didn’t need to think at all. When Bueckers overthinks, her biggest gift—the ability to analyze everything happening in the game—becomes a curse. She needed to double down on her strengths and stay present so that she could leverage her multivariate skill set to provide whatever the moment required, whether it was a hockey assist, a weakside block, an offensive rebound in traffic, or a flurry of pull-up jumpers.
Fudd, one of her closest teammates, eventually noticed a difference. “I feel like you can definitely see a significant shift in the player and person that she is this year compared to last year. She definitely has a lightness. She just feels freer. She plays freer as well,” she said, citing Paige’s three-game, 105-point-scoring explosion that stamped UConn’s ticket to Tampa. “It’s not selfish—it’s exactly what this team needs.”
The tactical and emotional peak for Bueckers came organically. As her college career drew closer to its end, her awareness grew. When she scored a career-high 40 points against Oklahoma in the Sweet 16, she simply accepted what Raegan Beers gave her, scoring bucket after bucket with the defense dropping back in pick-and-rolls. When she scored just 17 against South Carolina in the title game on Sunday (fittingly, the same number of points she scored in last year’s Final Four loss), she played off the defense again, helping her teammates take advantage of the swarming ball pressure the Gamecocks were throwing at her.
South Carolina opened the game using two disciplined, athletic defenders in Raven Johnson and Bree Hall to deny Bueckers the ball. In the past three seasons, the Gamecocks’ strength-in-numbers approach has netted two titles, at the expense of two transcendent stars in Clark and Bueckers herself. No one individual was going to take down this dynasty, and UConn knew that.
UConn’s first points came from Strong, who backed down a South Carolina defender from the 3-point line. A few moments later, off a kick-out from Bueckers, Strong flung a crosscourt pass to Kaitlyn Chen, who drove the ball against a closeout and made a layup. After that, Bueckers fed Chen, who backed down Te-Hina Paopao and found Jana El Afly on the dump-off. Within five minutes and 30 seconds, all five UConn starters had scored. UConn beat South Carolina the way that South Carolina beats its opponents, dismantling one of the most versatile defenses in the nation with waves of multivariate scoring attacks.
“There’s a lot of narratives that people can write about you. There’s a lot of people that can try to put you in a box and label you this, that you got to be like this person. You’ve got to be more aggressive, less passive, but standing firm, and we were, I think you saw a great depiction of that tonight, in terms of: We did it our way,” Bueckers said. “I did it my way, trusting my teammates, making the right pass, feeding off everyone who’s hot that night.”
Bueckers learned and adapted from her previous Final Four failures, but she hung on to her basketball philosophy and her raison d’être: being an unselfish, uplifting teammate. The Huskies, as a result, are back on top of the women’s basketball world for the first time since 2016.
As she climbed up the ladder at Amalie Arena, finally summiting the mountain she’d been climbing all these years, Bueckers leaned in to reach the inner part of the rim and cut down one tiny piece of the net, no bigger or smaller than that of any of her teammates.
Seerat Sohi covers the NBA, WNBA, and women’s college basketball for The Ringer. Her former stomping grounds include Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and basements all over Edmonton.
