UConn Basketball HC Geno Auriemma talks Ohio State postgame
UConn Women’s Basketball Head Coach Geno Auriemma met with the media following the Huskies 100-68 victory over Ohio State.
Full Press Conference Transcript
It seemed like you were really kind of disappointed with the offensive flow, and you felt like the defense was leading to a lot of offense.
GENO AURIEMMA: “I think so. I think Ohio State, the way they play, they open up the court a lot.
So it’s a gamble that when they win that gamble, they turn it into transition points for them. When they lose the gamble, they turn it into transition points for us. So I thought we handled it really, really well, and it gave us a lot of opportunities. But when we did run our stuff, when they took some of the pressure off, I thought our movement and our execution was way better than it was last game. Blanca? Yeah. Yeah.
You know, the way they played over there, 24-second shot clock, eight seconds to get it across the court. There’s so many more possessions. I don’t know.
You know, the possessions here, 30 seconds, 10 seconds. It’s not a lot, but it’s a little bit slower game here, but in some ways it’s a faster game here because of how we play. And I don’t think she’s used to being up this much, so that’s why she throws the ball to the other team a lot.
But once we fix that, I think we’re going to be okay. But she’s pretty unique, right?”
GENO AURIEMMA: “I don’t know how you all are getting the shot. I’m just curious how space or power now, you know, and scoring better and tricks. Yeah.
Well, I would say not specifically to the WNBA. I just think basketball in general. There’s such a lack of understanding of the game that playing transition is easier.
If you just get people to run and you get them to space the court and you just trust them to make plays as opposed to come down and execute and need four passes to score, which takes a lot of teamwork, which is not something that a lot of kids are familiar with these days. So playing fast, scoring on the move, scoring through concepts rather than plays is way more popular today at most levels of basketball. And that’s why the players that can think and can react and make plays for other people.
That’s why somebody like Djokic or Shea in the NBA, for instance, they’re so good with the ball. They make everybody around them so good that you don’t really need to run a lot of plays. You just run the floor, space it.
And it’s the same thing in college. We put the ball in Sarah Strong’s hands, and we’re going to get something really, really good. We don’t have to run a play.
Now, that’s all well and good, but you need really, really good players to do that because I think a lot of times at any level, WNBA, college, high school, there may be two really, really good players on your team, so when you run plays, those two guys are going to get most of the shots. So when you play the way we play, I have no idea who’s going to get most of the shots. The best players are going to get most of the shots, and that’s for us.
That’s how UConn plays. I think most teams that have a lot of good players, that’s how they want to play. We had 30 assists on 39 baskets today.
I mean, you’re not going to see much of that around the country, I don’t think. Well, I know Blanca’s reputation is she’s a scorer, so getting her up to speed and taking advantage of, you know, you watch her, how easy she gets to the basket. She finishes around the basket.
She makes enough threes that you have to come out and guard her. So, yeah, she has all the qualities of being that person. You know, Ash, when she’s got it going, you know, she’s more of an in spurts kind of guy.
So we’ve got, you know, we’ve got more than just AZ and Sarah. And I think Sarah Williams today was more aggressive and better than she has been. So we have a lot of candidates, but I think that’s what all the best teams have.
Obviously, we’re bigger. We’re longer. We can match up with other teams bigger size.
Make teams have to match up with us. I did like it. I don’t know that, you know, Blanca’s best position is there right now.
You know, Blanca and Sarah together where, you know, they’re interchangeable. So we’re still finding out. But for the time that they were together, those three, I thought it was pretty productive.”
GENO AURIEMMA: “Yeah, I think when you watch what she does, it’s pretty impressive, right? When you watch how she does it, it just makes you kind of realize that’s not normal. Most kids, you know, you can tell they’re working really hard to get their 30 points, 29 points. I don’t know that she works really, really hard.
I mean, it’s not as easy as she makes it look, but it kind of is, you know, because she just has such great body control. She has fantastic vision. She knows, you know, how the game is being played and where her advantages are.
And there isn’t a shout on the floor she can’t make. So she plays with such confidence and such poise because she knows I will never be on the court in any situation where I don’t know what to do. And that’s pretty great luxury to have as a kid.
GENO AURIEMMA: “Yeah. Well, based on what the little bit I’ve seen of Michigan, they will be for sure the best team we played this year by a long shot at this time in the season. They’re talented. They’re smart. They’re well balanced. They play exceptionally well together.
They’re really well coached, you know. Yeah. I texted Kim this morning, actually, and I said, I said, wow, I was shocked by the score against Notre Dame, right? That they played. Not that they won, but I just didn’t expect that score. And she said, yeah, I’m not looking forward to Friday. And I said, I’m not either.
I said, maybe we ought to just have a couple of drinks, go gamble a little bit and call it a day. They’re not going to be an easy team to play against at all. Utah, you know, they’re going through some transitions.
You know, their best player left to go play UCLA. That’s what I was saying the other night. Anymore, you don’t know what team you’re playing against.
Because you don’t have enough of a sample this year. And you can’t look at last year and go, oh, this is who, because so many teams have lost. You know, Ohio State being a perfect example, you know, their best player.
Then you get a couple of guys graduate. So I like the idea that we’re playing game, day off game, because it’s that’s NCAA tournament. You know, it’s exactly like the tournament.
So it’ll be good for us. It’ll be a really, really, really good test for us. Really good.
Well, I eventually get used to it. However, they have to get used to me not liking it. So unpredictable, meaning she might throw a pass that’s a fantastic pass.
And I’ll be like, wow, I didn’t know she could do that. Or she can get to the rim and have a finish that’s really, wow, she looks like a pro, right? She’s only 18 years old. So unpredictable in that way, wow.
Unpredictable and no human being could possibly throw that pass and think that it’s a good pass. So what really is the challenge is to look on her face like, what is your problem? Like, I’m supposed to be understanding that this is how I play. So it’s going to be a little bit of a battle.
Like, I know this is how you play, but this is how I coach. So we’re going to have to meet somewhere in the middle. But I wouldn’t take anything away from her.
I wouldn’t tell her stop doing this or stop doing that. Not at all. I’d like to constantly be, you know, her to constantly be aware what’s a good decision, what’s a bad decision.
But I don’t want her thinking like that when she’s playing. We’ll look at the film tomorrow and we’ll go, what do you think of that? And she’ll probably look at me and go, I think it’s pretty good. I asked her one time, I said, you know, those last couple of shots, you think good shot, bad shot, great shot? She goes, huh? You know what I was asking? I shoot it.
It’s a good shot. How would you deal with that? She’s got a lot of Svetlana in her. God bless her.”
GENO AURIEMMA: “Yeah. More physicality. More urgency. You know? That first half, a little bit of second half. I think she can be a lot more of a factor defensively for us because she’s quick enough and she’s long enough. She just has to learn how to make more than one play at a time.
Okay? I thought she did a great job getting position and making it easy for herself. I thought she started the game really aggressive. You know, we talked a lot before the game about, you know, I think there’s going to be multiple times when we can put the ball on the floor and get to the basket.
She did that right away. So, I want to say little by little, you know, her minutes are going to keep going up and her productivity is going to keep going up. It just takes a little bit of time to get used to playing here.
It’s … I want to pick my words. How do you say this? It’s probably blasphemous, I guess is the best word I can come up with, to say at this point that not a single thing that she does surprises me. What surprises me is how simple she makes the game look.
I think if she wanted to, this would be a normal night for her. But I also think she likes … you know, you see how many passes she throws where she could shoot and score.”
GENO AURIEMMA: “Yeah, there’s … yeah. As coaches, we just kind of shake our head and now, even in practice, we just … we almost want her to be perfect. Not fair, but I wouldn’t ask her to be if I didn’t think she could. I don’t know what the score was when she took that three from the corner.
Maybe it was 30, I don’t know. Maybe seven minutes left in the … I forget when it was. Right in front of our bench, she took that three and missed it.
She was really pissed, as if she missed a game-winning shot. She was really pissed. So that’s the kind of competitor she is.
You saw her dive on that loose ball in front of our bench, right? I have videos of Diana doing that, Maya doing that, Stewie doing that. Like, she’s a great player who doesn’t treat herself like that’s not my job. Like, that’s somebody else’s job.
My job is to score points. And yet, there she is, right? So, I’m just really proud of her right now. She’s good.
I would say those kinds of players, going as far back as … Carrie Bascom, when she went from freshman year being pretty good to sophomore year being the biggest player of the year, the next three years, you could almost see that they had this … The way they carried themselves was just different. With them, there was no more looking around going, Wow, I’m in college playing college basketball. I’m a UConn.
There’s this walking around of, there isn’t anything I can’t do. They don’t say it. They’re not arrogant about it.
But they just carry themselves in a way. And for me, to coach players like that, Stewie was coming off a national championship as a freshman, and now she’s in her sophomore year. You try to temper it, like, should I expect way more? But they expect way more of themselves.
That’s what I would say right now about Sarah. Whatever she expected of herself last year, which is probably a lot, she expects way more from herself this year. So I just try to manage that.
But it’s the rest of the guys on the team, they know, and somebody like AZ or any of the other guys, how many open shots, like Ohio State went zone. We were trying to run some man offense or something. They went zone, KK realized it, we made a cut, found Sarah in the middle without even looking.
She found AZ on the wing and we got a three. Average players can’t do that. So everybody on the team benefits from how talented she is.
I’m more impressed with her rebounding than her scoring. She just happens to be where the ball is. She didn’t look like herself at the beginning of the game.
She had like this, you know, not AZ type focus. So she needed a breather, I think, when she came out. Just kind of take a deep breath, get settled, and then once they start going in, they just keep going in.
And she’s another one. Every time she misses a shot, you throw up your hands, go, I can’t believe she missed that. Because she’s not supposed to, right? Because she has this reputation.
But she’s human. And normally, we were talking about it in the locker room, actually with the coaches, that you could tell that she didn’t have her normal locked in self. Whatever reason, you know, she’d been battling a cold for the last four or five days, you know.
But yeah, once she gets it going, man, yeah. Well, I told the team, especially in that second quarter, I thought, well, in the first quarter, I don’t think we played bad defensively. They just had a bunch of guys make shots that don’t normally make that many, especially from the three-point line.
And it looked like we were just trading baskets, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But in that second quarter, we just really, really made it difficult for them to get to the spots they wanted to go, get the shots they wanted to get. And I think it frustrates the other team when they can’t easily get from one spot to another, throw this pass from here to there easily.
So a lot of the turnovers, it’s not like we forced them, you know, some, they just happen because every single pass or every single possession, they’re under pressure. And I thought our guards did a great job of that on the perimeter. Johnny Cambridge is impossible to guard.
I mean, I think she even told one of our guys one time, I’m going to go right over there and shoot a jump shot. And she did. Like, she just is that good, you know? But I think we did a really, really good job forcing her into tough spots, you know, because she had maybe seven turnovers or something like that.”
GENO AURIEMMA: “Yeah. Our defense has been really, really, really good. Better than I thought it would be this early in the season. Better than I thought it would be. Yeah. It is.
You know, it is a challenge because you’ll have somebody that deserves 22 minutes and they only get 15. And you feel like I should play them more. And it’s a challenge because, you know, we won a national championship last year where everybody playing 38 minutes.
So you’re like, there’s nothing wrong with that, you know? Put the guys out there. They play a lot of time together. They get in great shape.
Can play through anything. And they know each other like the back of their hand. And boom, boom, boom. And you go, oh, you’ve got a lot of depth. You should play them. Okay. And you put them in and everything gets screwed up because all of a sudden, you know, everything changes. You know, it’s like, I’m not a cook by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, my wife Kathy does all that.
But I like to eat. But I know that when you make something that’s kind of like perfect and then you go, eh, let me add another ingredient. And then you screw the whole thing up.
So it’s a challenge trying to find the right combinations all the time. And we’re not going to get it right all the time. But, you know, I do want to see more people in more situations.”
GENO AURIEMMA: “So in the past, yeah, I kind of forgot how we did all that. I forgot how we did all that, you know? Because realistically, I mean, eight, nine, 10 players the whole game. I mean, every game, 10 players, double figures, minutes.
That’s hard. That’s hard, you know? NBA is 48 minutes. We got 40 minutes. It’s 200 minutes. Yeah, it’s hard. But it’s a luxury too because somebody doesn’t have it that night.
Move over and somebody else will come in. That’s the one luxury that you do have. With that. All right. Thank you, everybody.”
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