VILLANOVA, Pa. — The UConn women’s basketball team remained undefeated in the Big East with an 83-52 win over Villanova on Sunday, but the Huskies’ victory was overshadowed by an apparent left knee injury suffered by superstar Paige Bueckers.
The fifth-year senior went down in the final two minutes of the third quarter, landing on the floor in visible pain and grabbing her knee after a Villanova player fell into the back of her leg while chasing after a loose ball. Bueckers walked off the court on her own power but was limping as she exited the floor and went straight to the locker room with a UConn athletic trainer.
She appeared to be in tears as she returned to the bench a few minutes later, and she spent the rest of the game with a bag of ice around her left knee and ankle. Bueckers missed 18 games in 2021-22 with a tibial plateau and lateral mensicus tear in her left knee, then was sidelined by a left ACL tear for the entire 2022-23 season.
Coach Geno Auriemma did not seem concerned about Bueckers long-term and indicated postgame that her injury was similar to the minor knee sprain suffered by teammate Azzi Fudd against Louisville on Dec. 7. Fudd sat out of three games with her injury and returned to the starting lineup against Providence on Dec. 29.
“It’s these freaky things that happen when somebody runs into you,” Auriemma said. “Like what it was with Azzi, it’s not the worst thing that we can imagine, so that’s great news considering how awkward it looked.”
Despite playing just 25 minutes, Bueckers logged 15 points with a season-high nine assists in the victory, and she added three rebounds, three steals and a block. Freshman phenom Sarah Strong anchored the Huskies’ offense with 21 points shooting 9-for-12 from the field, also logging five rebounds, four assists, a steal and a block.
Strong was unstoppable in the first quarter for UConn, leading the team with 10 first-quarter points, and she hot 100% from the field including a pair of made 3-pointers. The freshman did a little bit of everything for the Huskies over the opening minutes, also leading in rebounds and assists after the first quarter. UConn took control of the game once Strong and Bueckers settled into their connection with both players’ first points coming off assists from the other.
“I just really kind of marvel at the composure (Strong) has, the way the game plays so slow for her,” Auriemma said. “I would like to think that if anything great is going to happen with this team, it’s going to be because she’s at the forefront of it. Paige isn’t going to be able to do it by herself, and having Sarah is going to make Paige better. And Paige makes Sarah better, because every time Sarah’s open, Paige finds her.”
Bueckers hit a pull-up jump shot at the buzzer to send UConn into the next quarter with a 23-15 lead, and the redshirt senior helped power the Huskies on a 12-3 run to start the second with three assists over the first four minutes. Strong continued to control the offensive production entering halftime with 17 points, but UConn had seven different players with points and 16 assists on its first 17 made field goals.
Auriemma leaned heavily on smaller lineups playing starting center Jana El Alfy and 6-foot-3 forward Ice Brady for a combined eight minutes in the first half, and Brady didn’t see the court at all until midway through the second quarter. Freshman Morgan Cheli started the quarter as UConn’s only forward on the floor without a single player taller than 6-foot alongside her, and Strong played the majority of her first-half minutes running the center for the Huskies. But the guard-heavy groups didn’t miss a beat against an undersized Villanova team, outscoring the Wildcats 20-6 in the paint in the first half.
“Our lineups are going to be driven a lot by who we’re playing against,” Auriemma said. “We have to be flexible enough to play big when we have to and play smaller when we want to and when we have to. But yeah, today most of the lineups looked pretty good.”
Villanova hits four straight field goals out of halftime for its biggest run of the game, but UConn answered immediately with a 13-3 run of its own. Fudd put up five points in less than a minute after she had three in the entire first half, and Bueckers exceeded her first-half production with eight points over eight minutes in the third quarter.
After Bueckers’s injury, KK Arnold helped fill the void for UConn off the bench. The sophomore logged her second straight game with a season-high in points scoring 15 shooting 6-for-7 from the field. The Huskies had nine different players finish with at least two points, and their bench outscored Villanova’s 32-9. The Wildcats were led by freshman standout Jasmine Bascoe with 12 points, but UConn’s defense limited her to just 4-for-17 from the field and kept Villanova to 33.3% shooting as a team. The Huskies were efficient across the board hitting 59.3% from the field and 40% from 3-point range, and they also capitalized on the Wildcats’ every mistake with 16 points on 14 forced turnovers.
“Their pressure, I thought they did a great job,” Villanova head coach Denise Dillon said. “We talked about it with the full-court press, and I thought we did a decent job of breaking the press, but once we got into the half court under their pressure, we were just not setting up some of our actions, screens … which definitely made for an unsettled offense and taking some rushed shots.”