Guru’s WBB March Madness — II: The No. 1 Ranked Team Foiled Again by a Feisty Cinderella in Arizona Setting Up An All-Pac-12 Final

By Mel Greenberg @womhoopsguru

SAN ANTONIO — In the end it is not going to be the No. 1 ranked for the overall No. 1 seed. 

Nor will it be the that No. 1 ranked team against the No. 1 left 12 months ago without a tournament to complete its business.

Following South Carolina’s inability to put a shot down that would have caused a celebration as regulation time expired, the in-the-bag thoughts by the New Englanders among the limited crowd in the Alamodome Friday night instead saw their team get bagged in a national semifinal again.

This time the damage was done by a three-seed Cinderella and Arizona moves on to an all-PAC-12 final here Sunday night against Stanford in its first-ever national title game appearance, following its demolition in a 69-59 upset of Connecticut.

The outcome leaves the Huskies (28-2) with a now five-year gap since their record NCAA championship trophy collection grew to 11 in 2016.

Arizona (21-5) becomes the storybook finish in waiting obliterating the perceived storybook close to the Cinderella season experienced by UConn freshman Paige Bueckers.

The opponent the Wildcats will face they know too well in overall No. 1 Stanford (30-2) which emerged with a 66-65 win over South Carolina (26-5) and put them twice during the West Coast wars in the conference.

That’s much different than the foe they knew little about Friday night.

Following their only loss of the season at Arkansas in a hastily prepared non-conference tilt, looking to solidify their Net resume for the NCAA women’s basketball tournament committee, Connecticut returned to their newly reacquired wars in the Big East rolling along with the way with their prized rookie Paige Blueckers collecting unprecedented awards to rarely if at all land in the laps of freshman.

She put 18 more points into her season collection while the focus looks at someone heading out the doors in  senior Aari McDonald, who had previously assembled a pair of consecutive 30-point performances and in this one had scored 26 points and collected six rebounds.

While coach and Arizona alum Adia Barnes said the slight of not being in an NCAA highlight video with the other Women’s Final Four squads, her team got fired up.

“I love it,” she said.”I’ve been an underdog my whole life. Too small to do this, too this to do that, too inexperienced to do this. We prove it wrong every time. I don’t care. It just motivates me and my team.”

Barnes also thought that way in citing others evaluating McDonald’s defense.

“I think she’s really underrated on defense,” Barnes said. “I thought in my mind, she should have been the national Defensive Player of the Year. There was no other player thar impacts the game on both ends of the floor more. 

“There is no other player that for the 37 minutes presses full court and gets steals, rebounds, all these things that she does. I feel like she’s a great defender. She’s our catalyst on defense and offense. She didn’t really allow Paige to get into the flow.”

Barnes made tournament with South Carolina’s Dawn Staley making it the first time two Black coaches reached the same Women’s Fnal Four.

“For me to get here one time, it doesn’t really mean a lot,” Barnes said, contrasting herself to Staley, Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma, and Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer. “They’ve been here so many times. That’s what I aspire to have my program do one day.”

Answering what element Arizona had that others didn’t notice in sizing up the UConn/Arizona match, McDonald said, “My teammates are dogs. I mean, it starts with me. I think the effect rubbed off on my teammates this last stretch of playing basketball. I’m just proud of them. We wasn’t scared. I mean it showed tonight. I’m just extremely proud of them.”

Since the 2016 championship, completing a run of all four in the Breanna Stewart era in 2016, the Huskies lost in the overtime buzzer-beater to Mississippi State in the national semifinal that ended the 119-game win streak, the buzzer-beater loss to Notre Dame, the follow-up loss to Notre Dame in the 2019 national semifinal by a larger margin, and the cancellation a year ago that just added to the streak of title drive failures.

“First, I want to congratulate Arizona,” Auriemma said. “They played amazing. That first half, it was incredibly difficult for us to get anything done. And I thought the intensity level that they played with and the aggressiveness on the defensive end, we just didn’t respond as I hoped we would.

“That’s two games in a row we faced that kind of pressure,:” he referenced the narrow win over Baylor in the River Walk Region title game. “I think it took its toll. All the credit goes to Arizona.

“Aari McDonald, I said, going into the game, I don’t think we’ve had to play against a guard as good as she is, and she proved it tonight. She just dominated the entire game start to finish.

“We pride ourselves on being pretty good at certain things. We had no answer for her.

“As good as Paige was this year, and she carried our team through most of the season, that’s not how you win championships, with one player having to do everything.

“Paige is another example that you’re only as good as teammates. It’s the bottom line. You’re only as god as the team around you.

“Aari McDonald was amazing tonight. She got a lot of support from every kid on their team. Everybody on their team did their part, made shots when they were open, made plays when they had to make them.

“We’ve talked about what was missing tonight, their defense took us out of our offense,” Auriemma said. “We were in a scramble mode a lot offensively. We got it back, I think, then we just missed shots that you got to make at this level at this point in time,” Auriemma explained.

“You’ve got to make those shots. You got to make those free throws. You got to make those layups that you get. You have to make those open threes that you get. They’re not easy to come by.

“I think the growth of our team is going to be in those areas. You got to be able to play a bunch of high-level games in a row, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, in order to win the whole thing,” Auriemma continued. “And you got to get a little bit of luck. Look at that first game tonight. 

“It could have gone either way. A bounce of the ball there, a bounce on the rim either way. You need to be really good and you need to get a little bit of luck.”

And that’s the report.