What’s on deck for the Huskies after closing The Paige Bueckers Era with a national championship?
Team: Connecticut Huskies
2024-25 Record: 37-3, 18-0 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: First, beating out Creighton by two games, aka the two times that the Huskies beat the Bluejays.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #1
Her Hoop Stats: #1
BartTorvik.com: #1
Postseason? After sailing through the Big East tournament with wins of at least 20 points in each of their three games, UConn didn’t slow down much after that. After three straight 20+ point wins to start the tournament, USC speed bumped the Huskies with a 14 point win in the Elite Eight. UCLA couldn’t do a thing with UConn in the Final Four, and Connecticut claimed their first national title since 2016 with a 23 point win over South Carolina.
Notable Departures: Just two from the championship winning rotation. The big one is THE big one, as Paige Bueckers followed up hoisting the NCAA championship trophy by being the #1 pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft. FUN FACT: Her Dallas Wings are 1-10 as I type this on June 12th, which means Bueckers has already lost more WNBA games than she lost college games over the past two seasons combined!
Obviously replacing Bueckers and her 20/4/5/2 per night will be A Whole Thing for UConn, but they’re losing Kaitlyn Chen, too. Chen started all 40 games for the Huskies this past season, chipping in 6.9 points and 3.4 assists per game in 23.5 minutes on average. She ended up as the #30 pick in the WNBA Draft, but didn’t make it out of training camp with the expansion Golden State Valkyries.
Notable Returners: What is Sarah Strong capable of now that she’s got her freshman year of hoops under her belt? She went for 16.4 points, 8.9 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 2.3 steals, and 1.7 blocks per game this past season on her way to being named Second Team All-American by the Associated Press. SEEMS GOOD.
Strong is joined by Ashlynn Shade, KK Arnold, and Jana El Alfy in the “returning after playing in all 40 games last season” club. None of those three started all 40, with El Alfy getting 27 starts, Shade getting 12, and Arnold coming off the bench for every game. Still, you can just pencil that group together with Strong to get you to four obvious starters for UConn next season, and that’s a pretty good way to go about things…..
….. and that’s before I remind you that Azzi Fudd’s back, too. She was #3 on the scoring chart for the Huskies at 13.6 per game while starting in 30 of her 34 appearances. The 5’11” guard from Virginia slowly worked her way back into the lineup after missing almost all of the previous season with an injury, and once she was back for good, Fudd was, in a word, good. 14.2 points per game from Game #12 of the season onwards, thanks to 45% long range shooting. She didn’t add much else on the stat sheet, but between Bueckers, Strong, Chen, and El Alfy, she just needed to hit open shots to be making a major contribution.
So that’s UConn’s probable starting 5, and we’re not done with running down their contributing returning players. Ice Brady appeared in 32 games and made 12 starts as a sophomore last season, and Morgan Cheli made 24 appearances, averaging over 13 minutes a game when she got on the court. They were both essentially depth pieces last season, but they’ll probably have to pick up the pace in 2025-26.
We do have two question marks to mention here. Caroline Ducharme is still on the roster after playing in nine games last season to bring her total over the past two seasons to just 13 contests. The good news for her is that all nine appearances were all after Valentine’s Day, so perhaps that means she’s getting her health back to the point where she can contribute regularly. Ducharme averaged 7.4 points and 4.1 rebounds per game as a sophomore back in 2022-23, so if she can go, she can definitely do some stuff for UConn. Same goes for Ayanna Patterson, who missed all of each of the last two years due to injury. It was a knee injury in 2023-24 and then a shoulder injury in 2024-25, so there’s at least that. The former top five prospect averaged 2.2 points and 2.2 rebounds in 10 minutes a game back in her first season on campus, so it’s clear that the Huskies’ coaching staff trusted her basketball instincts out of the gate. If she has a clean bill of health now, I like her chances to be a positive contributor here.
Key Additions: Connecticut is adding three freshmen and two transfers to the roster for this coming season. Two of the freshmen are in ESPN’s top 100, but it’s possible/likely we don’t see much of them given UConn’s overall depth. Kelis Fisher (5’9” guard) comes in as the #25 prospect in the country, while Gandy Malou-Mamel (6’5” center) is #75. The third freshman is Blanca Quinonez (6’2” forward), who comes to Storrs from Ecuador by way of time playing for Magnolia Basket Campobasso in Italy since 2020. I can’t rule out Quinonez making some kind of immediate impact, given that she averaged 10.5 points and 4.5 rebounds for Ecuador’s national team — not a junior team, the full blown national team — back in the 2022 South American Championship.
Kayleigh Heckel is the lesser of the two transfers in terms of “what have they done in Division 1 so far,” although that’s maybe not entirely her fault. The 5’9” guard from New York is making a move closer to home after spending her freshman year at USC. She appeared in 34 games and averaged 6.1 points in just under 17 minutes per game. When you consider that’s for a USC team that went 31-4 and spent the entire season in the top 7 of the Associated Press poll, that’s pretty dang good for a freshman.
The other transfer is Serah Williams, and she’s probably going to be a handful. The 6’4” Brooklyn product is coming off averaging 19.2 points and 9.8 rebounds last year for Wisconsin, which means she just barely missed a second straight season averaging a double-double. She did this while the Badgers were going 28-34 across those two seasons, so it feels like it’s hard to say any of that is actually Williams’ fault. This will be her only season at UConn, so it feels safe to say that she’s not going to Storrs to sit on the bench, but we’ll have to wait and see how she fits into the rotation.
Coach: Geno Auriemma, entering his 41st season in charge in Storrs. He has a record of 1,250 wins and 165 losses, and that keeps sounding insane every single time I have to bring it up when I do these summer check-ins.
Outlook: It is safe to say that Paige Bueckers did not need to cap her UConn career to validate her as one of the best players in program history, but it’s definitely a feather in her cap. It also marked UConn’s first title since 2016, back when Breanna Stewart was capping her career with a fourth straight national championship. Wrapping up 2025 with a title also helped wipe away the disappointment from 2023, when UConn didn’t reach the Final Four for the first time since 2007.
With all that in mind, the question becomes “What’s next?” I think it’s pretty safe to say that a starting five of Sarah Strong, Azzi Fudd, KK Arnold, Ashlynn Shade, and Jana El Alfy is good enough to win the Big East. I mean, SPOILER ALERT: Sarah Strong is going to be the Big East Preseason Player of the Year unless brain eating parasites infect all the coaches in the league when it comes time to vote in October. I’d go so far as to say that there’s enough here between returning players and the incoming transfers that UConn should be able to make a serious run at going undefeated in league play for the third straight season.
If that’s the case, then the next question is thus: Is this a national championship contending UConn team? That probably depends on exactly how much the Huskies get from their bench along the way. If Brady and Cheli can give them a little bit more, if Ducharme is back to being a full-time contributor, if both transfers work out, if they get at least something from one of the three freshmen…… yeah, probably, that’s a title contender. If you define top 10 teams as title contenders, that combination of factors is probably good enough to put them there. The ceiling is a title contender, I guess my question is merely how high is UConn’s floor?