Paige Bueckers and UConn top Stanford, 63-58, in a Final Four slugfest

MINNEAPOLIS — Paige Bueckers scored 14 points in her Minnesota homecoming at the Final Four, leading Connecticut to a 63-58 upset of defending champion Stanford Friday night.

Wait, hold on. Connecticut upset Stanford? Since when does Connecticut upset anyone?

OK, fine, maybe it wasn’t an upset. But it’s safe to say it was a bit of a surprise.

That’s how good this Cardinal team was: ranked No. 2 in the nation, and above the Huskies in major statistical rankings, including the NET.

Would that have been the case if Bueckers hadn’t missed 19 games from early December to late February because of a knee injury? Maybe not. But plenty of observers favored Stanford in this game, with its balanced offense featuring guards Lexie Hull and Haley Jones and forward Cameron Brink.

They ended up wrong, and the many UConn fans in the packed crowd of 18,268 at the Target Center ended up thrilled. The Huskies face South Carolina for the championship there Sunday at 8 p.m. (ESPN, ESPN+).

Those fans had to wait a while to celebrate, though. The score was just 12-9 in UConn’s favor after the first quarter, with Bueckers 2-for-4 from the field. Stanford’s 9 was just as surprising, with the Cardinal 4-for-16 from the field in the period. Jones shot just 2-for-5, and Hull missed her only attempt.

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Connecticut pulled ahead 25-19 with 2 minutes, 47 left thanks to back-to-back three-pointers by Evina Westbrook. The Cardinal scored the game’s next seven points to take their only lead of the half, 26-25, with 1:20 left.

Stanford shot just 11-for-30 from the field in the first 20 minutes; the Huskies shot 12-for-34, and led 27-26 at intermission.

Stanford’s shooting woes continued in the third quarter: just 4-for-16 from the field. But Jones willed her way to a double-double, with 12 points and 10 rebounds through 30 minutes. That was enough for the Cardinal to be within 39-37 at the end of the period.

Hull was 1-for-9 from the field up to then, and 0-for-3 from beyond the arc. Some of that was to the credit of Connecticut’s defense, but not all of it.

In fact, the answer the Cardinal sought was in the paint, not at the perimeter. Brink also had 12 points through three quarters, and the Huskies struggled to stop her when she had the ball.

Meanwhile, UConn was heating up at the other end. A three-pointer by Christyn Williams put the Huskies up 49-41 with 8:30 left in the game, and Minneapolis was starting to sound like a suburb of Hartford. When Bueckers got a steal and layup three minutes later, the fans finally let out the awaited big roar.

“I knew it was going to be a very competitive, sort of sluggish game,” Bueckers said. “It’s awesome that it’s at my hometown, but that’s not really our focus, our team’s focus, my focus. We’re all just trying to win, and whatever we have to do to do it, I think we’re going to keep doing that.”

Stanford tried to claw its way back throughout the fourth quarter, and got to within 58-56 on a Jones layup with 23 seconds to go. That gave her a game-high 20 points on the night. But the Huskies sealed the deal at the free-throw line, including two big makes by big-time freshman Azzi Fudd right after Jones’ layup.

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“Points are hard to come by in this tournament. — today was certainly no different,” Auriemma said. “You’re going to have to win some other way than thinking you’re just going to come out here and it’s going to be nicey-nicey, and they’re going to let you shoot whatever shot you want to shoot. … We didn’t exactly play our A-game on the offensive end, but the things we needed to do when we had to do them, we came up big.”

And the Norristown native admitted he knew the odds.

“This is a really, really hard game to win — Stanford is the defending national champions and they have everybody back, and they’re not playing Sunday night,” Auriemma said. “Sometimes you don’t have to have the best team to win this game, either. Sometimes you just have to play the best that night, and you have to make some big plays in big moments, and you do just enough with what you have.”

Now UConn is on to its 12th national championship game, in the same building where the Huskies won their first in 1995 — and coincidentally, they beat Stanford in those semifinals, too.