UConn women’s basketball’s weaknesses were exposed in loss at Notre Dame. Here’s what went wrong, what Geno Auriemma wants to see improve

UConn women’s basketball dropped its first game of the season on Sunday, losing to No. 7 Notre Dame (7-1) on the road, 74-60.

The No. 3 Huskies (6-1) were without Azzi Fudd for the entire second half and didn’t have graduate forward Dorka Juhász available for the fifth consecutive game, as she’s out with a broken thumb. As head coach Geno Auriemma put it, they just didn’t have enough scorers on the floor. But the loss exposed a lot more than that.

“We’ll get Dorka back, obviously that’ll help a lot. We’ll get Azzi back, so that’ll help a lot,” UConn head coach Geno Auriemma said. “But just because you get players back, some of the things that we did today that hurt ourselves, those aren’t going away just because you add a couple more players. So there’s a bunch of things that we need to fix and they became evident today for sure.”

Though the offense certainly had trouble — UConn generated just .882 points per possession and shot a mere 36.8% from the floor, both season lows by a drastic margin — the loss was about more than that. The Huskies were exposed on the defensive end of the floor.

Notre Dame’s 1.102 points per possession were the most UConn has allowed an opponent all season. As were the 46 points in the paint — that’s 12 points more than any team had scored in that area of the floor against the Huskies.

The Fighting Irish shot 56.1% from the field on the afternoon and 46.2% from beyond the arc, which were also season-highs given up by the Huskies. UConn allowed its opponent to shoot 57% from the floor or better in all but one quarter — the third, when it made a run to cut the deficit to five points.

“I thought we screwed up a lot of coverages defensively,” Auriemma said. “I don’t know that we communicated as well. And I do have this theory when you don’t score for stretches you fall asleep defensively too. And I thought we did that a couple times and gave up a couple of big shots, couple layups. So we got to tighten up some of our coverages defensively and communicate a little bit better. There was just too many breakdowns that we had.”

Auriemma said two of the Huskies’ goals entering the matchup were to limit Notre Dame’s free-throw attempts — the Fighting Irish were averaging 29.3 attempts per game entering Sunday’s game — and win the rebounding battle. Though UConn only allowed its opponent to get to the charity stripe a season-low seven times, it lost on the boards, 39-26, and Notre Dame still found plenty of other ways to score. Sophomore guard Olivia Miles was a big reason why.

The Huskies allowed Miles to go off for 21 points, eight rebounds and four assists. The majority of her scoring production came in the first half, in which she had 15 points. That included scoring 13 of the Fighting Irish’s first 15 points of the game.

Miles sliced and weaved through the UConn defense to get to the rim early. Auriemma said a point of emphasis was to not give her a chance to go right to the basket with her strong hand, but the Huskies let her do so anyway. Then as they crashed the paint later in the game, Miles used her passing ability to find open teammates for easy points.

“Like all really, really good guards I think she senses the tempo of the game,” Auriemma said of Miles. “She kind of dictates where she wants the ball to go and there’s very little that you can do. There’s only so many things that you can prepare defensively. ... For every little thing that you take away, she finds — and obviously you need a supporting cast — but she finds whoever it is that you left open to come help compensate for her. And she did a great job today of not just getting her own shot but distributing the ball to her teammates, who made big shots too.”

Notre Dame led by as many as 18 points in the third quarter, but UConn cleaned things up defensively and managed to cut the deficit to five with 3:44 left in the period.

That’s when the Huskies’ lack of depth, with just seven players available for the second half, two of which rarely see the floor, factored in.

Lou Lopez Sénéchal and Nika Mühl both played all 40 minutes while Aaliyah Edwards was on the court for 38. They were also the only Huskies to score in double figures, accounting for 76.7% of the team’s points. That’s another issue Auriemma wants to target moving forward.

“That’s not sustainable. So we have to find ways to get more people into the game that are going to be productive,” Auriemma said. “… The second half coming out of the locker room I thought we were the better team for long stretches. I thought our effort, I think we got a little bit fatigued. They’re not an easy team to have to play a lot of minutes (against).”

Auriemma expects to have Fudd back for UConn’s next game against Princeton on Thursday, explaining she was kept out following a knee injury scare as more of a precaution, while Juhász’s return will depend on how she reacts to practice this week.

As for the Huskies as a whole, it’s now a matter of how they respond to their first defeat of the season and improve on the weaknesses that came to light.

“Winning the game would have been great this afternoon, it would have been an awesome win here against a really, really good team,” Auriemma said. “But the next best thing to winning the game was we kind of got a glimpse of like what could happen if we don’t make up for whatever it is missing.”