HARTFORD, Conn. _ UConn's 2019-20 season opener against Cal feels like a lifetime ago in more ways than one.
Four players scored all but two of UConn's 72 points that day. Geno Auriemma described the game as weird nine times in the postgame press conference. At one point during the game, Crystal Dangerfield went up to Auriemma and told him she didn't think the team could run its plays.
There have certainly been some bumps in the road along the way, but the 26-3 Huskies team that will enter this weekend's AAC Tournament, UConn's seventh and final one before the school returns to the Big East, is night-and-day better than the one that showed up to Gampel on Nov. 10 and the contests closely after.
More than that, the Huskies are playing their best basketball with the most meaningful stretch of the season at their doorstep.
"I have not had a child, but it's like raising a child, and you see them blossom into this beautiful thing," senior floor general Dangerfield said of the team's growth following Monday's regular-season finale against USF. "Sometimes you just want to beat your head against the wall. But then you see bright moments in them, and that's really what this has been. Now we're playing really great basketball, and it's come at a great time."
On paper, UConn's first two months of the season went as well as they could have. The Huskies won their first 12 games, including a big road win against DePaul. As they have in all but five seasons since 1994-1995, they earned a No. 1 ranking in the Associated Press poll as 2019 came to a close, even though Auriemma insisted that they weren't truly the nation's top team.
That reality became clear in the first six weeks of 2020. The Huskies came away with a scrappy victory against old rival Tennessee, competed well into the fourth quarter against the U.S. national team in an exhibition and made their way through conference play with a bit more intrigue than in previous seasons but no true close calls.
But matchups against Baylor, Oregon and South Carolina resulted in historic and decisive losses. Only three weeks ago, after UConn fell on the road to South Carolina, Auriemma argued that UConn was "allowed to lose a goddamn game once in a while where the other team plays better." He conceded that, while some years the program's goal is to get a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament and win a title, this year's objective is more so to get the team in the best position possible for March and see what happens.
The Huskies closed out regular season AAC play strong, as well as with an all-time undefeated record. Their last three games, two of which were against teams in the upper echelon of the AAC, featured arguably UConn's best stretch of play this season. Following Monday's game, Auriemma offered that they're "a pretty good team" and that "I like where we are right now."
And while the team's growth since that South Carolina game cannot be understated, neither can its progression since the start of the season.
Surpassing Auriemma's expectations, the Huskies have been most consistent on the defensive end, where, by most metrics, they sport one of the best units in the country. Without a lock-down defender like Kia Nurse or Gabby Williams who can eliminate an opponent's best player(s), UConn has relied more on team defense, with Olivia Nelson-Ododa holding things down in the paint without much depth behind her. As Monday's game put on full display, UConn's improved defense and rebounding has allowed them to further exploit teams in transition and to oftentimes build an insurmountable lead before halftime. In conference play, they held opponents to 47.4 points per game on 30.9 shooting from the field. And even though it failed to slow down Oregon's explosive offense, UConn's defense wasn't as much of the issue in their losses to South Carolina and Baylor.
Production on the other end of the floor has been harder to come by, as UConn looked to establish an identity after the departure of Napheesa Collier and Katie Lou Samuelson and their combined 4,743 career points. That transition period looked ugly at times, even in the last four weeks alone (see: first quarter of the South Carolina game, first half of the USF game in Tampa). But over their last three games, their ball and people movement has looked as effortless as it has all season, and they're finally seeing their shots fall. UConn posted its first 100-point outing and in the other two games had five players posting double figures.
The individual progress from the beginning of the season, even from the tail end of last year, is just as promising. Dangerfield, the team's lone senior starter, not only became a more vocal leader, but proved capable of taking over games when needed. Megan Walker, the expected conference player of the year, took a massive step from her sophomore year to emerge as the team's leading scorer and has posted at least 20 points in 16 contests so far this year. Christyn Williams, Olivia Nelson-Ododa, Anna Makurat and Aubrey Griffin all went through their respective peaks and valleys as they either adjusted to their new roles or, for the freshmen, adjusted to college basketball, period. But the group of underclassmen are impacting games in ways they weren't always doing earlier in the season and seem to be on an upward trajectory, providing UConn with more offensive options than they had on Nov. 10.
"We're peaking at the right time," Walker said. "Coach is proud of us. We've been through ups and downs this season, so for us to put together a good stretch where we're putting up points, we're stopping people, we're running in transition, it looks fun. It looks like my freshman year when we had all those guys, so we're getting back to that. And we want to put together another stretch this weekend with the tournament and then take it game by game."
UConn's 26-3 regular season record signifies a lot of things, and it also signifies nothing. Yes, UConn hasn't proved itself as an elite team this year and enters the Tournament with the most regular season losses since Breanna Stewart's freshman year. Yes, in a season chock-full of upsets across the country and with a relatively inexperienced group returning, UConn has strung together its 27th consecutive 25-win season and should secure 30 wins without much trouble.
But for better or for worse, much of this UConn team's legacy will be determined by whether they can employ all this team-wide and individual progress since November and since their last loss and perform in crunch time _ when the competition gets stiffer and everything, including a 15th straight Elite Eight and a 13th-straight Final Four, is on the line.
"We have two games left and we have nine games left and everything in between," Auriemma said. "That's basically what it comes down to. You could play twice or you could play nine times, or anything else. We'll see."
