STORRS, Conn. — If Paige Bueckers is feeling the emotions of senior day, she doesn’t show it. The UConn guard walks onto the court at Gampel Pavilion, flanked by her siblings, holding their hands. Her sister sobs, and many of her teammates are already teary-eyed, but Bueckers sports a small smile.
The usual senior day rites transpire — Bueckers receives a framed jersey, poses for a slew of photos as she and three teammates are honored. But the attention of the 10,000 fans in the stands who stayed for the ceremony after the Huskies’ regular-season finale zeroes in on Bueckers for what’s next. Illuminated by a spotlight on the east wall, a black drape falls to unveil a small banner that marks Bueckers’ induction into the Huskies of Honor, which commemorates the top players in UConn women’s basketball’s storied history.
Her arms crossed, Bueckers briefly takes in the reveal but quickly turns back to chat with teammates. Bueckers’ individual accomplishments rival UConn’s all-time greats, but she wants to hang a different banner in the rafters at Gampel. And this year — really, these next two weeks — marks her last chance to make it happen.
How this March Madness plays out for Bueckers and the No. 2 seed Huskies will, for better or worse, largely shape how her UConn career will be remembered.
When Bueckers arrived at UConn in the summer of 2020, the program boasted 11 national titles but none since 2016, Breanna Stewart‘s senior year. Championships are the standard in Storrs. Rebecca Lobo has one. Sue Bird, Maya Moore and Tina Charles won two. Diana Taurasi won three and Stewart four. After four years without one, Bueckers was deemed the player who would help end the drought.
But a championship has proved elusive for Bueckers and the Huskies. She won national player of the year in 2021 and led UConn to the Final Four every year she has been on the court, including a trip to the national championship game. But the biggest prize has never come into her grasp.
There’s still time. As UConn heads into Saturday’s Sweet 16 game against third-seeded Oklahoma (5:30 p.m. ET, ESPN) in the Spokane 4 Regional, Bueckers is surrounded by the most depth and talent — sharpshooter Azzi Fudd and dazzling freshman Sarah Strong — she has ever had in a March run. Win a championship, Bueckers will clinch her storybook ending, return the Huskies to the mountaintop and secure the sole accolade missing from her résumé to this point. Fall short and she would be considered the best UConn player to never win a title.
Bueckers’ chances of cutting down the nets hinge on her ability to shed that burden, bury it and take charge when her team needs it most. And to not believe the outcome of the next two weeks will ultimately define her.
“You don’t win 11 national championships without high-powered, driven, overachievers that really just get after it every day. [But] that goal they have, it’s their biggest strength and it’s their biggest weakness,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma told ESPN. “The thing that makes you who you are, how great you are, unchecked and unmanaged properly, is going to also be the thing that hurts you the most.
“The trick is, how do you manage that? How do you not let the fear of ‘what if I’m not [good enough]’ get in the way? And that is the special sauce that the great ones have.”
2:11
Paige Bueckers drops 34 points as UConn routs SDST to reach Sweet 16
Paige Bueckers scores 34 points in her final game at Gampel Pavilion to lead UConn past South Dakota State in the NCAA tournament.
WHEN BIRD ARRIVED in Storrs ahead of the 1998-99 season, UConn had only one national championship. Four seasons earlier, Lobo led the Huskies on a magical 35-0 run to a title in Minneapolis. Like Lobo before her and Taurasi who played on after her, Bird helped build what is now considered one of sports’ greatest dynasties.
Among all NCAA men’s and women’s teams, the Huskies hold the record for most titles (11, tied with UCLA men), Final Four appearances (23, including a record 14 straight from 2008 to 2022), undefeated seasons (six) and longest winning streak (111 games from 2014 to 2017). On Monday, UConn clinched its 31st consecutive appearance in the Sweet 16, extending the longest streak in NCAA tournament history.
The almost preposterous standard of greatness in Storrs even hits Bird, a soon-to-be Hall of Famer, when she walks into the team’s practice facility and looks up at the various rows of banners for the championships, former players of the year, All-Americans and Olympians.
“On one hand, I’m so proud that my name is even up there, that I helped put two banners up there,” said Bird, who guided the Huskies to their second and third titles in 2000 and 2002. “Then I look at my name, and you see the years underneath, and it’s the one place where you’re an All-American and a national player of the year one time, and you look like a schmuck because you’re surrounded by people who were All-Americans three and four times. … I’m like, ‘Thank God for the Olympic side or else I’d have no years under my name.’
“I’m half-joking, but I’m not.”
Each of UConn’s eight previous players of the year won at least one national title; five have multiple. Yet Auriemma insists that leaving UConn without a ring won’t diminish anything for Bueckers.
“There are a lot of great players that have had amazing careers that have never won a national championship, that have never been to a Final Four,” the coach said.
Perhaps championships don’t have to dictate somebody’s impact, Bird said. But in conversations about all-time greats, she said, “I do think it is the ultimate tiebreaker.”
Bueckers understood the legacy and the expectations she was walking into when she committed to the Huskies. She chose to play at UConn with the intention of winning national championships, knowing the stakes of embarking on that journey.
“If you’re going to shy away from it at all and if you don’t want that pressure,” she told ESPN, “then just don’t come to UConn.”
.@RebeccaLobo says Paige Bueckers is playing the best basketball of her career 🙌 pic.twitter.com/wGO5N8GVHS
— espnW (@espnW) March 25, 2025
AFTER BUECKERS’ FRESHMAN season, it looked as if bringing a title back to Storrs was a matter of when, not if. In 2021, she became the first freshman to win the Wooden Award and Naismith Player of the Year, and spurred the Huskies to yet another Final Four. Already one of the game’s biggest stars on court, her fame was driven into another stratosphere later that year when the NCAA finally allowed college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness.
Little went as planned after that.
The program experienced its most snakebit stretch in decades with injuries. Bueckers sat out the majority of her sophomore season in 2021-22 with a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear before sustaining a torn ACL in August 2022, sidelining her for her junior year.
When Bueckers returned to the court in November 2023, things finally seemed to be falling into place. The Huskies were mostly at full strength and would have a year to build their chemistry. And then, as Bueckers told ESPN, came “body blow after body blow.”
Fudd and four other teammates went down because of season-ending injuries within the first two months of the 2023-24 campaign. Since Bueckers’ sophomore year, UConn has endured 12 season-ending injuries, none more consequential than Fudd. The No. 1 recruit the year after Bueckers, the close friends signed with UConn as hopeful stewards of a new era of dominance for the program. Instead, they’d shared the court for only 17 games in their first two seasons together.
Bueckers felt the losses of her friends and teammates deeply.
“It completely drains you and messes you up mentally,” Bueckers said. “I have a great faith, I have a great belief in God and everything happening for a reason, but it’s just sometimes you can’t help but to ask why.”
Is Paige Bueckers the most efficient player in the history of Women’s College Basketball? She is certainly the most efficient in the last 25 years. (Research: Carter Roche, Jenni LaCroix and Her Hoop Stats.) pic.twitter.com/UbI5sv5NPc
— Rebecca Lobo (@RebeccaLobo) March 23, 2025
The injuries were only part of the weight she carried. She had become fixated on what people were saying about her on social media, caught up in the comparison game with other players. She had become overly results-focused, with a singular outcome in mind of winning a national championship.
Bueckers bottled it up. Internalizing things comes naturally to her, she says, and she doesn’t always find it easy to be vulnerable with others. She thought she was strong enough to handle it alone.
“You wake up sometimes and you’re just anxious and you’re not in the state of how I normally am, like a little kid just happy to play basketball. I’m sort of like, ‘Man, I can’t wait for the game to be over today,'” Bueckers said. “Just because of all the negative things that can come with the pressures from other people, social media, the injuries that were just draining for our team.”
After a national semifinal loss to Iowa, she opened up to Auriemma about what she was going through. But he had already sensed that something was off with his star.
Her play on the court, particularly in the postseason, had almost never been better as she willed the short-handed Huskies to yet another Final Four. But “even though we’re winning, you’re playing great, everybody thinks you’re the greatest ever,” Auriemma added, “that doesn’t make you feel better.”
He recommended she see a sports psychologist who works outside of UConn, someone Bueckers has since been working with to develop a mindset more firmly planted in the now. The past can’t do anything for you, and the future isn’t here yet. Stay where your feet are, she has preached throughout the season, and win the day.
“[I’m] keeping that big picture in mind,” Bueckers said of winning a championship, “but focusing on also setting the small brush strokes.”
She used to have a folder where she’d save negative things people would say about her, receipts she could point back to when she proved them wrong. Now she feels as if she’s running her own race — “standing firm in who I am and my way works,” she said. “I’m not trying to be anybody else or be what other people want me to be.”
“I feel like there is a sense of calmness, like she’s more secure in who she is, and she doesn’t need to worry about those comparisons,” Fudd told ESPN. “She has such a firm understanding of who she is, Paige Bueckers as not only a basketball player, but as a person.”
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Paige Bueckers buries buzzer-beating 3 to end 1st quarter
UConn ends the quarter with some momentum as Paige Bueckers knocks down a 3-pointer at the horn.
UCONN COULDN’T BUY a bucket.
The Huskies trailed 10-6 late in the first quarter of a second-round NCAA tournament matchup against South Dakota State at Gampel on Monday. The Jackrabbits looked unfazed despite playing on the road in the so-called Basketball Capital of the World. And the Huskies’ cold start had extended to Bueckers, her first two shots bouncing off the rim — hardly the ideal beginning to Bueckers’ final home game at UConn.
But she persevered — and a switch flipped. Bueckers scored her first points on a pair of free throws with 2:56 left in the period, then rattled off 10 straight points for the Huskies in the final two minutes of the quarter. A midrange jumper. A drive to the basket. A pull-up in the lane. Then the most emphatic of all, a step-back 3-pointer at the quarter buzzer that everyone at Gampel knew was going in. It left Bueckers slapping her chest as she backpedaled to the UConn bench. The Huskies never trailed again.
But she wasn’t done. She made her next four attempts — a fadeaway, a 3-pointer, another jump shot and then a pull-up — eight straight in all. She was stoic during the run, keeping her concentration on the play at hand, until she dished a no-look pass to the wing to Ashlynn Shade, who sank a 3-pointer to put UConn up 19, prompting Bueckers to emphatically punch the air.
The end result: a memorable Storrs finale for Bueckers. Twenty-two days after that senior day ceremony, she finished with 34 points on 14-for-21 shooting, tying her career high in scoring and her NCAA tournament-best mark. And of utmost importance, she helped get the victory, positioning UConn four wins away from a title.
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Paige Bueckers receives ovation in final game at Gampel Pavilion
UConn star Paige Bueckers gets a standing ovation from the crowd as she checks out for the final time at Gampel Pavilion.
Still, Auriemma has maintained that no player, not even Bueckers, can single-handedly win a championship. So far in the tournament, the Huskies have displayed the firepower to help get her one.
“I think a lot of us, our mindset is like, yes, we really want to win a national championship,” Fudd said. “But I think most of us on the team are like, we want to do it for Paige. We’ve seen everything she’s been through and everything that she does for us. … We want to reciprocate that and do anything for her, and we know how badly she wants it.”
Said Auriemma: “Today, I think she was just thinking about winning and she was even more efficient than she normally is. [She’s been] waiting five years for this moment and hopefully there’s a bunch more coming up.”
Auriemma knows better than anyone that it’s that ability to think about winning — and not be fixated on the potential of losing — that makes the difference in March. He has spent decades working with the mega-talented and driven — the Birds and Taurasis, Stewarts and Moores. The ones who set lofty goals, such as multiple All-American honors and national titles, and actually achieve them, but also have to face the possibility of falling short.
It’s a process littered with walking the narrowest of tightropes, navigating the finest of lines.
“You don’t owe anybody anything,” the coach has told Bueckers. “And if you don’t play another game ever at the University of Connecticut, you’ve given them way more than they bargained for when you got here, regardless of what anybody thinks.”
The trick, Auriemma said, is to replace the paralysis from the fear of losing with a willingness to do whatever it takes to win, and bring your teammates along with you. And it’s to avoid thinking that the outcome of these games is going to define your life. The minute you change your process and treat things any differently than a normal game, it spells trouble, he says.
But it’s also about being able to look in the mirror and ask: Are you happy with yourself? Are you happy with your process? Are you happy with the work you put in? Are you happy with how you’re leading your team? Are you happy with who you are and comfortable in your own skin?
“Because if you are,” Auriemma said, “your life is going to be fantastic, whether you ever leave here with a national championship or you don’t. And if you’re not happy with yourself and you win a national championship, that ain’t gonna make you happier. It’ll make a lot of people around you happier, but ain’t gonna make you happier.”
This season, Auriemma has seen a version of Bueckers who’s in a different frame of mind. Yes, on court she leads the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio and is one of the country’s most efficient players, registering the rare 50-40-90 split — shooting at least 50% from the field, 40% from 3-point range and 90% at the foul line. But he sees someone who’s more at peace with herself, and probably in a better place now than any other time during her career at UConn. Winning has little to do with it.
“To have gone through what I’ve gone through — I can’t remember, four or five surgeries that I’ve had this entire time that I’ve been here — I’ve bounced back from every single one with my head held high, never changed in who I am as a person,” Bueckers said. “I think I’ve only grown here as an individual, as a person and as a player, and I’m extremely grateful. It was a dream come true. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
