TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa Azzi is not Spokane Azzi. It may just be what brings a national championship back to Connecticut for the first time in nearly a decade.
Azzi Fudd, one of the sharpest shooters in the game, headed to the Final Four off one of her worst performances of the season. It was a non-factor for UConn, who overmatched a USC squad missing Naismith Player of the Year JuJu Watkins in the Spokane 4 regional final.
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It will be a factor moving forward. A change of scenery from pine trees to palms can do wonders.
“I left that in Spokane,” Fudd told reporters. “So it’s Tampa, a new me. It’s March, it’s the Final Four, you can’t keep any of that with you. Every game is a new game. Even each quarter, every possession is a new possession.”
The fourth-year guard scored 19 points — all in the first half, and more than in the two games in Spokane combined — to lead UConn to a 34-point victory over UCLA, the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament. The No. 2 seed Huskies are the first team in an NCAA tournament game, women’s or men’s, to defeat a No. 1 seed by 30 or more points. They bested their own record with the largest margin of victory in a Final Four game.
It all started with Fudd, who tipped the ball away on UCLA’s first possession and scored. She caused chaos for Bruins point guard Kiki Rice, a player she knows well from high school games in the Washington, D.C., area. UCLA spent the majority of the first half with more turnovers than field goals. From the jump, Fudd hunted her shot and hit three 3-pointers on five attempts, including an early one off the backboard.
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“The bank was open for a minute, so I took advantage of it,” said Fudd, who went 7-of-12 overall.
UConn’s Azzi Fudd scored all 19 of her points before halftime in the Huskies’ win over UCLA on Friday. (Alika Jenner/Getty Images)
(Alika Jenner via Getty Images)
That was the kind of night it was for UConn, which built a 10-point lead through one quarter and a 20-point one by half. The Huskies haven’t lost since rival Tennessee edged them by four on Feb. 6. The 15-game run includes the 29-point smackdown of South Carolina on the road when Fudd neared her season-high with 28 points. She had 34 against an inferior St. John’s program.
That is the Fudd UConn needs when the lights are bright and the heat is on. Off days are a reality for any player. The key is to keep it from spiraling, and she worked with sports psychologists this season to build a mental foundation to reset after bad games like what happened in the Pacific Northwest.
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“As long as I believe that I’m going to be great this weekend, that’s all that matters,” Fudd said. “I don’t care what anyone else thinks. That’s what I believe and that’s exactly how it was. I knew I was going to be great this weekend and I’m going to be great Sunday, and no one can change my mind about that.”
Fudd is the X-factor of the team’s big three. Senior point guard Paige Bueckers is a graduate senior on a mission in her final postseason, and with three points on Sunday, she will hold the UConn record for career scoring average. Maya Moore currently holds the mark. Freshman Sarah Strong is a versatile complement charging into her place with a national freshman of the year award and a game-high 22 points on Friday night.
They’re the constants. Fudd, as shooters are wont to do, has been more of a pop-in appearance at times. To win it all, the Huskies need all three of the major contributors, plus some others sprinkled in. Head coach Geno Auriemma and UConn know, because they’ve done it this way 11 times before. It’s a common theme of their titles, he said.
“If you show up missing some pieces, it’s going to [be] exposed here on this stage this weekend,” Auriemma said. “And when we showed up generally speaking with the right pieces, we were able to, more times than not, win a championship. When we showed up here shorthanded, we didn’t.”
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What those teams likely didn’t have that this does is the rare praise that Auriemma, often described as a curmudgeon, delivered in the aftermath of a historic win. The team was flawless, he said. Every possession, every quarter.
Fudd, seated two seats from Auriemma, delivered a quick side-eye glance of confusion at his comment. Is he feeling OK? she may have thought, offering it “definitely wasn’t a perfect game.”
“We haven’t watched film yet,” Bueckers later quipped. “So that will probably answer that.”
Complacency isn’t their nature, they said. They’ve worked to be better every day of the season, and throughout the bumpy injury-prone seasons they’ve been a Husky. There’s one day to find the flaws and forget it while growing from it.
“When we wake up tomorrow, it’s a new day, a new scout, a new opportunity for us to play even better as a team,” Fudd said.
A new day, with Azzi still in Tampa.
