Reusse: When it’s all said and done, Paige Bueckers wants the final say

There was a pair of sizable tables reserved in the side room of the Mainstreet Bar & Grill in Hopkins on Monday. The extremely large TV screen displayed Texas in the process of grinding down TCU in a regional final for the women’s NCAA Division I basketball tournament.

There was minimal attention being paid to this, as the 15 or so people were there to join Brian Cosgriff in watching Connecticut take on Southern California in the upcoming regional final from Spokane, Wash.

UConn had three losses in the regular season, landing with a No. 2 seed in the top-heavy world of women’s college basketball. Southern Cal had the No. 1 seed out west, but the Huskies were 14-point favorites because of Trojans superstar JuJu Watkins injuring an ACL in a second-round victory over Mississippi State.

UConn’s Paige Bueckers, the most famous of the many great players Cosgriff coached while winning seven state titles in 21 seasons at Hopkins, was the main attraction for these viewers. And Paige also was familiar with what Watkins, a sophomore, now faces to regain her greatness.

Bueckers had a lateral meniscus injury that cost her 19 games as a sophomore in 2021-22. She then suffered the ACL tear practicing in a gym in August 2022.

That cost Bueckers the 2022-23 season — and also ended coach Geno Auriemma and the Huskies’ record streak of 14 consecutive Final Fours dating to 2008.

Bueckers managed to drag the Huskies back to the Final Four in 2024, even as many of her teammates were injured — including her buddy and co-star Azzi Fudd, also with an ACL tear.

Now, Bueckers would be attempting to make it 4-for-4 in reaching Final Fours in seasons in which she played. And when watching a game with Cosgriff, and former assistant Dre Jefferson (now head coach at Edina), and some high school friends, you are reminded that Paige not only is a basketball prodigy but a fabulous character.

“You can’t get the last word in with Paige,” Cosgriff said.

There is evidence of that in many lengthy written features on Bueckers, but it always comes as a surprise that she is such a — what? — rascal.

Bueckers puts together a sensational second half and scores 40 points in an 82-59 win over Oklahoma in the Sweet Sixteen. She is asked on the ESPN telecast postgame to comment on her brilliant effort, and she immediately starts giving credit to her teammates.

Immediate reaction: Put Paige on a poster as Humble Athlete of the Year.

Except, you also notice that when subbed out late in the game and Auriemma is standing there next to the bench, waiting for a winning handshake at the least, Bueckers blows right by him and goes to her teammates.

What was that?

“Paige might have been agitating Geno,” Cosgriff said. “She probably thought it was funny to leave him standing there.”

Others at the tables smiled and Cosgriff said: “She’s a prankster. You never know what’s coming next. She’s a unique individual.”

The UConn label had much to do with Auriemma landing Bueckers as the nation’s No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2020. Cosgriff is convinced there was another advantage for the wily legend from Storrs, Conn.

“Most coaches from the big programs would send their assistants to our games, to Paige’s other events,” Cosgriff said. “Geno showed up in person. Not all the time, but most of the time.”

Mike Anthony wrote an outstanding piece for the Hartford Courant on the burgeoning Auriemma-Bueckers relationship in March 2020, right before Hopkins was anticipated to complete its second consecutive unbeaten Class 4A championship season.

Anthony was in the Twin Cities and sat in on a Cosgriff team meeting. When it was over, Bueckers was laughing with teammates about Auriemma missing a phone call from her.

“He’s got to pick up the phone when I call him,” she said.

Deadpanning anger, apparently.

Auriemma did call back and, according to the coach (through Anthony), it went like this:

“She goes, ‘I have a very high basketball IQ.’ I go, ‘You do, huh?‘”

Her response: “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think my basketball IQ is higher than yours.”

To which Geno said: “Just making that statement shows what a [unintelligent] person you are.”

This was before Bueckers graduated and headed for Connecticut.

“Paige is not arrogant; she’s confident,” Cosgriff said. “Very confident …

“I first saw her playing at halftime of a Gophers game at Williams Arena. She was in the second grade, playing against sixth-graders. She was a peanut, but out there dribbling all over, making passes.

“She finally hit a growth spurt in the seventh grade. She was good enough to play varsity as a seventh-grader, but we had an excellent team with juniors and seniors. So, she would play three halves a night, with the ‘B’ squad and the junior varsity.”

Bueckers played five years of varsity for Hopkins. They lost three consecutive Class 4A finals. The Royals were unbeaten champs in 2019. And in Bueckers’ senior season, they had a 62-game winning streak, before the title game — vs. Farmington, a team they had defeated handily earlier — was called off by the rapid COVID-19 shutdown.

“I can’t imagine a world in which we wouldn’t have won that game with our team that had Paige, Amaya Battle, Taylor Woodson, Maya Nnaji and Nunu Agara — all major college players," Cosgriff said.

UConn and Bueckers were knocked off 69-59 by Arizona in the semifinals in 2021 in San Antonio. She was back from the first knee injury and reached the title game here in Minneapolis in 2022. Dawn Staley’s hard-nosed and gifted athletes were no team to be facing after missing more than half the season because of a knee injury. South Carolina won 64-49 in a blowout.

Bueckers was out in 2023 and so was UConn. The Huskies were back as long shots in 2024 and lost 71-69 to Iowa and Caitlin Clark in the semifinals.

Geno’s still not happy about that moving screen called against his team that bailed out Caitlin and the Hawkeyes.

The comparisons between Clark and Bueckers were inevitable — and will be again when Bueckers enter the WNBA this spring as the anticipated No. 1 draft choice.

Sloane Martin, much-heard on TV play-by-play for women’s basketball and a serious student of what she’s watching, was asked for a Clark-Bueckers comparison.

“They both are 6-foot true point guards and put a lot of emphasis on their passing, racking up assists,” Martin said. “Geno for years has been begging Paige to be more selfish, look for her shot more — kind of what we’ve been seeing during this amazing NCAA run where Paige is taking over games.

“Caitlin plays a high-octane style that feels impossible to slow down. Paige is exacting and calculating — takes a scalpel to the game. They both pick you apart but in different ways.”

One glaring difference: Bueckers can and does play excellent defense. Caitlin doesn’t expend her energy on defense.

More frequent Clark matchups for Bueckers are in the future. Now, on this Monday night, the task was reaching the Final Four — and perhaps getting Auriemma his first title since 2016.

Southern Cal, without JuJu, hung tough with its size. Sarah Strong, the UConn freshman who lives up to that last name, was magnificent with 22 points and 17 rebounds. And then Bueckers owned the fourth quarter, finishing with 31 points, and UConn won by exactly 14 — 78-64.

UConn celebrated, but the Huskies ignored the ladder under a basket and didn’t cut down a net. There’s more to get done if this team is going to live up to Auriemma’s prediction from her arrival in Storrs that somewhere down the line the Huskies would be saying of Bueckers:

“We wouldn’t have won the national championship without her.”