Tag: UConn

UConn’s Christyn Williams put on a show in the first half of women’s NCAA Sweet 16 game vs. Iowa

UConn’s UConn’s Christyn Williams scored a career-high 18 points in the first half and managed to contain Iowa guard Caitlin Clark.

The NCAA women’s basketball tournament kicked off the Sweet 16 round with an anticipated match-up featuring two of the most exciting players in college sports in UConn’s Paige Bueckers and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark.

But it was another player that stole the show in the first half of Saturday’s first Sweet 16 game.

UConn guard Christyn Williams had an impressive first half for the Huskies, where she scored a career-high 18 points in the first half. She shot 8-of-14 from the field, including 2-of-6 from behind the three-point line. That helped give the No. 1 Huskies a 49-35 lead over No. 4 Iowa at halftime.

But Williams’ feat is even more impressive given she had the difficult task of defending one of the best players in college basketball in Clark, who was held to just seven points in the first half.

The winner of this Sweet 16 game will advance to the Elite 8, where they’ll face the winner of No. 2 Baylor and No. 6 Michigan.

Paige Bueckers is already the best player in college basketball according to Diana Taurasi

This is some really high praise.

Paige Bueckers has been getting high praise from every direction all season long at UConn and it’s well deserved.

But none of it quite holds as much weight as the latest she just got from an all-time great. Diana Taurasi has already stamped Bueckers as the best player in college basketball in a new video from TOGETHXR.

That might sound like hyperbole, but she’s not wrong. She’s one of the best basketball players we’ve seen grace a floor.

She’s averaging 19.9 points per game on 54% shooting from the field and 47% shooting from 3-point range. She also averages 6 assists per game and somehow sticks out on a stacked UConn team.

Taurasi explained it herself.

“The first game I watched her play, I watched the first quarter and I told Penny [Taylor] and I text coach [Geno] Auriemma and I said ‘she’s the best player in basketball already.’For the simpel fact is she can pass. She makes really hard passes look really easy and she makes really easy passes look easy. And that alone sets her apart,”

She also compared Paige to herself in college and she thinks Bueckers already has more confidence.

“Oh, Freshman Paige has way more confidence than I did. I was in the doghouse. I was like the water girl. I was doing chores for the seniors. We were in way different boats…But, Paige, the level she’s playing at right now as a freshman. It’s incredible. You don’t play that efficiently and with that much confidence as a rookie as a freshman at Connecticut. 

Well said. Straight from the GOAT herself. And the best part is we’ll get to see Paige’s skill again on Saturday during her Sweet 16 matchup against Caitlin Clark and Iowa.

This is going to be a great one.

 

The Spurs paid tribute to NCAA women’s basketball legends with pre-game jerseys

The Spurs showed love to more players than just Becky Hammon.

Before their game against the Charlotte Hornets on Monday evening, the San Antonio Spurs paid tribute to some of the best players who have ever stepped on the floor during the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.

Especially after the pathetic weight room originally provided to the NCAA women’s teams and all of the other ways the NCAA has failed its women’s tournament, it was refreshing to see such support from such a respected NBA team.

Spurs point guard Dejounte Murray got things started with a hat tip to his assistant coach, Becky Hammon, who is a legend both on and off the floor.

Hammon, who has been an assistant for San Antonio since 2014, was once one of the best college basketball players in the nation. She ran point for the Colorado State Rams from 1995 until 1999, leading her mid-major squad to the Sweet Sixteen.

Spurs veteran DeMar DeRozan entered the arena wearing a Cheryl Miller jersey.

Miller, like DeRozan, played college basketball for the USC Trojans from 1982 until 1986. She won Naismith College Basketball Player of the Year during three consecutive seasons, securing national championships in 1986 and 1987 as well.

Her jersey number, No. 31, is retired by the University of Southern California.

Rudy Gay was rocking a jersey from Rebecca Lobo, who is celebrated as one of the most decorated athletes in the history of UCONN’s prestigious women’s basketball program.

Lobo helped lead the team to an undefeated record and a national title in 1995. It was only the second time that a women’s team ran the table for an entire season.

Of course, NBA veteran guard Patty Mills had to show some love to his wife, former Saint Mary’s wing Alyssa Levesque.

Mills, who is one of many Australian basketball players who have attended Saint Mary’s in California, met Alyssa when they were both in college in the late 2000s.

They were married in July 2019 and reportedly have a pretty cute pre-game coffee routine scheduled for whenever the Spurs play in San Antonio.

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UConn’s men bagged an early match-play title with three freshmen in the lineup and a renewed sense of gratitude

Dave Pezzino and his UConn men’s golf team gained quite a bit of perspective in the past year. That translated to an early match-play title.

Dave Pezzino’s team didn’t play in the fall, and holed up in Storrs, Connecticut, the UConn men’s golf coach found himself grateful that he could live through the experiences of the teams that did tee it up.

Months of quarantine went by during the COVID-19 pandemic when there was no golf to watch. The Tour came back in June but college golf came back – sort of – in September. Pezzino happily tuned in to the Blessings Collegiate Invitational on Golf Channel the first week of October.

Two weeks later, he was running numbers just to feel it again.

“The Maridoe tournament, I was grateful that they put a hole location sheet out because I took that, broke it down, started looking at pluses and minuses on the hole locations,” he said. “I missed it so much.”

Pezzino’s last memory from the 2020 college season is from the fairway at nearby Tallwood Golf Club. It was March 12, the day before the NCAA called off all spring sports amid a spreading pandemic, and Pezzino felt a heart-to-heart was in order.

“I didn’t think we were playing very well and I thought it was more of a growing-up issue and just staying focused because the world around us was falling apart when this whole thing was going down,” he said. “None of us had ever experienced anything like this. I think I was trying to push them a little bit.”

Pezzino didn’t keep track of the days that elapsed from that speech to Feb. 1, 2021, the opening round of Big East Match Play. It was more than 300.

With COVID-19 cases so high in the Northeast, Pezzino knew it made more sense for his players to spend the fall season at home where they could practice, take classes online and ultimately stay safer. The Huskies “crushed it, academically,” Pezzino said.

“As much as I missed them, it was the right thing to do.”

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Pezzino brought his players back to campus Jan. 3. They quarantined and started practice a few days later, sacrificing warmer weather for the chance to finally be together.

Never in his coaching career has Pezzino begun a spring season with back-to-back match-play tournaments. This month, UConn’s men have won five of six matches as a team between the Big East event and the Ball State-hosted Earl Yestingsmeier Match Play.

Big East Match Play allowed Pezzino to see how his men stacked up in the conference. Teams played Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Florida, which hosted the inaugural Pelican Women’s Championship on the LPGA in November. That amounted to a pinch-me moment on many levels.

“The conditions of the golf course were phenomenal,” Pezzino said. “To be able to get out at a place like that in February, the week before the Super Bowl in the Super Bowl hometown, with the hometown team? It’s mind-numbing.”

Rankings: Men’s team | Men’s individual

UConn defeated Seton Hall and DePaul that week, only falling to tournament champion Marquette. A week later, UConn took the bottom seed in Ball State’s match-play event (based on their ranking last spring) and in the pool-play format, earned head-to-head wins over Drake, Loyola-Chicago and Evansville to claim the title.

The Huskies are young, with half the lineup teeing it up in their first college competition at those events. Pezzino couldn’t think of a better way to ease them in.

“It was awesome for me because the freshmen had never played in a college event before so it was OK if they stubbed their toe, it wasn’t a big number,” he said. “It was just a lost hole.”

From here, UConn has three weeks off until the team competes again at the Sea Palms Invite in St. Simons Island, Georgia. Pezzino says his men could not be more grateful for the opportunity ahead this season. That’s a feeling many teams are probably experiencing.

If there was one positive to a longer-than-expected break, perhaps it’s perspective.

“Give these guys a dozen balls and they’re so excited,” he said. “It’s like we’ve hit refresh on the college golf experience here at UConn.”

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Notre Dame Win Further Highlights Tough Times for Duke

Notre Dame is doing everything it can to keep its feeble NCAA Tournament hopes alive.

Notre Dame is doing everything it can to keep its feeble NCAA Tournament hopes alive. It took a step in the right direction Tuesday after beating Duke, 93-89. This was only the second time the Irish had won a game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, and it came after they trailed, 23-8, in the first half. The soon-to-be-retired Jack Nolan lamented on the air about not being able to travel to Durham for the game, which was for obvious reasons.

Normally, a win like this would be a resume booster for a team that’s now 8-10 overall and 5-7 in the ACC, even if its chances of playing in March Madness are slim. Just the fact that the Irish beat a historically prominent program on its own floor, even without fans, gives them a great sense of pride. But Duke has fallen on hard times. The Blue Devils now are 5-7 in conference play and have a 7-8 overall record, which puts them at a couple of marks they haven’t seen for a long time:

Now, those facts don’t tell the whole story. The 1999-2000 Blue Devils started their season with a pair of losses to a star-packed Stanford team and a UConn bunch still riding the high of beating them in the national championship game the previous spring. They quickly recovered and ended up with 29 wins. During the 1994-95 season, Mike Krzyzewski took a leave of absence to deal with a back injury, and Duke fell apart under interim coach Pete Gaudet, resulting in the worst season in program history.

This season can partly be blamed on the impact of COVID-19 as it has limited the amount of time the Blue Devils otherwise would have spent together. It’s also a very young team that Krzyzewski had to build almost from scratch with many players from last year either graduating or going to the NBA. But there’s no one reason for why this program is struggling just to finish with a winning record. Everything working against it just seemed to happen at once.

With more NBA hopefuls heading to the G-League or overseas and the likelihood of high school players being able to head straight to the draft once again, Duke may not be able to get back to respectability so easily. The aforementioned factors stretch the amateur basketball talent pool further by the day. It’s almost sure to level the playing field, so maybe this is the time for new programs to reign supreme from year to year. Plus, Krzyzewski is closer to the end of his career than the beginning, and it will be nearly impossible for the Blue Devils to find a coach of his stature and influence down the road.

It’s often said that when Duke loses, America wins. But where’s the fun in saying that if the losses are happening more often than not? Perhaps we’ve finally reached that point where the villain has to accept the ultimate defeat, never to pose a threat to the greater good again. While it may not be coming in a way people expected or possibly even wanted, all good and bad things must eventually come to an end, and we don’t always get to choose how we arrive there.

Jets’ Foley Fatukasi, Bennett Jackson star in ‘The Late Show’ segment

Foley Fatukasi and Bennett Jackson starred in a segment on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Foley Fatukasi and Bennett Jackson got their first taste of late-night television after making an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Fatukasi and Jackson appeared in a segment of Sunday’s episode that offered a unique take on player introductions. Typically, fans will watch an NFL game on TV and see or hear player names accompanied by their alma maters. But what if those standard player introductions were directed by Hollywood legends like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg?

The Late Show has the answer, with an assist from Fatukasi, Jackson and other NFL players.

As you can see, the first player introduction was based on a scene from Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” Fatukasi got to acknowledge his days at the University of Connecticut.

Jackson, meanwhile, was given the character name of “Benny Two Times,” a spoof on the “Goodfellas” character Jimmy Two Times. Naturally, Jackson called out his alma mater, Notre Dame, twice.

The next player introduction that featured Jackson was based on Werner Herzog’s “Grizzly Man.” He played the character of Timothy Treadwell. Jackson got approached by a grizzly bear while the narrator said there is nothing safe about playing safety. The narrator then gave a quick shout out to Notre Dame.

Fatukasi’s last appearance was in a spoof of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction.” He played the character of Brett from the movie. Fatukasi explained to Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules Winfield, that he was Foley Fatukasi from Uconn. Jackson played a small role in that scene as well.

After the Jets recognized Fatukasi and Jackson for their performances in a tweet, The Late Show responded and said that “Oscars are being sent in the mail.”

UConn defeats Lady Vols

Recapping Tennessee’s loss to UConn Thursday night.

Longtime women’s college basketball rivals Tennessee and Connecticut renewed acquaintances in Knoxville Thursday night.

The No. 3 Huskies left Thompson-Boling Arena with a 67-61 victory.

The No. 25 Lady Vols led throughout much of the game and held a slim 49-45 advantage heading into the fourth quarter only to see UConn notch a comeback victory.

Rae Burrell, Rennia Davis, Tamari Key and Marta Suarez all posted solid performances for Tennessee (9-3), which has now lost two of its last three games.

Burrell scored 18 points, pulled down eight rebounds, dished out a pair of assists and had a blocked shot.

Davis finished with 11 points, nine rebounds, three assists and a block. Key finished with 10 points and nine boards. She also had three blocked shots.

Suarez had 10 points and six rebounds for the Lady Vols, who led 35-34 at halftime.

Chrystin Williams, a guard for the Huskies led all scorers with 20 points.

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WATCH: Comparing Kemba Walker’s G3 stepback to a classic at UConn

Boston Celtics star point guard Kemba Walker unleashed an eerily familiar step-back jumper against the Philadelphia 76ers on Friday.

We got a bit of a throwback moment to reminisce over in Boston Celtics point guard Kemba Walker’s Game 3 performance against the Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference 2020 NBA Playoffs first round.

The UConn product hearkened back to his legendary postseason run, where he won 11 straight games to win the Big East and NCAA titles without losing one of them, unleashing a filthy stepback against Pitt in the Big East Tournament that bears a striking resemblance to the one he stick on former Celtic Al Horford’s face Friday.

“Cardiac” Kemba — so called for the heart attacks Walker gives fans with those late-clock daggers — called up a little of that Connecticut magic for the Celtics in a moment of need.

True fans of the game over at NBC Sports Boston, their announcing crew couldn’t help but contrast the two step-backs, near mirror images separated by nearly a decade.

So much so it elicited a comment from teammate Brad Wanamaker, who happened to be on the other side of he court for the first one in 2011, noting he was happy to be on this side of that jumper this time around.

Watch the clip embedded above to see the two shots compared yourself.

Something tells us it isn’t the last time we’ll have a Cardiac Kemba moment this postseason, too.

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‘It was tough’: Kemba Walker on death of ex-teammate Stanley Robinson

Boston Celtics starting point guard Kemba Walker shared his thoughts on the unexpected death of former UConn teammate Stanley Robinson.

Boston Celtics starting point guard Kemba Walker shared his thoughts about some especially somber news at Thursday’s team media availability session. Asked about his feelings on hearing of his former college teammate Stanley “Sticks” Robinson’s untimely death, the Bronx native was clearly in grief.

“It was tough. It was really, really shocking to hear that news,” related Walker on Robinson’s death.

A fellow Connecticut player, Robinson had found less success at the next level, playing several stints overseas and in the G League after being drafted by the Orlando Magic but not making their final roster in 2010.

“He was just a happy guy, man,” explained the UConn product. “Always smiling. He was an upperclassmen, so he was a guy who I watched before I got this. Fun to play with, throwing lobs and stuff like that. It’s a real sad moment. I really feel bad for his family, his kids.”

“He’s a Husky forever. May he Rest In Peace,” added Walker, who shared a Connecticut roster for two seasons between 2008 and 2010.

As of Thursday evening, the reason for Robinson’s death is unknown — he was found lifeless by his mother on Tuesday.

“The UConn Basketball family grieves the loss of the great player and an even greater person, Stanley ‘Sticks’ Robinson,” the UConn men’s basketball team posted on Twitter.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with Stanley’s family at this difficult time.”

Rest In Peace, Stanley Robinson.

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WATCH: Kemba Walker takes us back to the step-back that started it all

Boston Celtics All-Star point guard Kemba Walker breaks down the step back that put him on the map at UConn with Celtics team reporter Marc D’Amico.

On Thursday, the Celtics Wire highlighted all the best of Boston Celtics All-Star point guard Kemba Walker’s best step-back jumpers of his pro career, spanning everything he’s done with the Celtics and much of his best daggers from his time with the Charlotte Hornets.

But the one we didn’t share — arguably, the most important of any of them — was a step-back that launched the most epic NCAA title run in the Tournament’s history — fresh off of a fairly absurd run to the Big East title.

In many ways, the future contours of Walker’s pro career were already present in that run, which caught the eye of Hornets owner Michael Jordan and set the UConn product’s career down the path it took today.

Present on that floor in the video Walker and Celtics team reporter Marc D’Amico break down is Pitt product and current teammate Brad Wanamaker.

The final boss of the ex-Husky’s NCAA run was none other than his current coach Brad Stevens’ Butler squad — back again for another shot at a title the season after another teammate (Gordon Hayward) swung at Duke and missed.

Watch the video embedded above to see Cardiac Kemba discuss the iconic moment that would one day reunite the fanbases of the University of Connecticut and the Boston Celtics again as he unleashed one of the daggers behind the late-clock killings from whence that nickname derives.

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