Breanna Stewart was already in elite company long before she led the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team to a 10th NCAA championship, and third in a row. Now, she stands alone in one specific way, and could set herself further apart as a senior next season.
The 38-1 journey to yet another national title ended Tuesday night at Tampa’s Amalie Arena, with Stewart and her fellow Huskies defeating Notre Dame 63-53, the second straight year that UConn had stopped the Fighting Irish in the title game after it beat Louisville in the 2013 final during Stewart’s freshman year.
By earning Most Outstanding Player honors at the Final Four, the Cicero-North Sryacuse great became the first woman to ever claim that award three times. Only one man did it – UCLA’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in 1967, ’68 and ’69, when he was known as Lew Alcindor.
The final was, by Stewart’s own high standards, an uneven effort. She only scored eight points, but pulled down 15 rebounds, blocked four shots and altered several other shots to set the defensive tone for a UConn team that just could not put Notre Dame away.
With 8:39 in the first half, Stewart took a bad step on a drive to the basket and tweaked her left ankle. She went to the bench, got the ankle taped up, returned a minute later and played the rest of the night.
“I knew I was coming back in, but it hurt,” Stewart said of the ankle. “I rolled it very nicely. But there is no way you are going to sit out a national championship game.”
Up by eight points, 31-23, at halftime, the Huskies kept fending off the Irish with timely 3-point shots from the likes of Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis and Moriah Jefferson. With the score still 56-50 and less than five minutes to play, Mosqueda-Lewis hit another 3-pointer, and Notre Dame never really threatened again.
After the game, when it was announced that Stewart was Final Four MOP once more, she got emotional, saying that Jefferson deserved it as much as she did. But the praise Auriemma had for her standout junior was unequivocal.
“Sometimes you recruit a kid and you think this kid’s going to be it and they’re not,” said Auriemma. “And sometimes you get pleasantly surprised. With Stewy we kind of knew she had it and then all she needed was a stage to prove it. And she’s done it, man.
“I’ve coached some great ones and she’s as good as anybody I’ve ever coached when the big moments come.”
Before the rematch with Notre Dame, UConn took out Big Ten champion Maryland 81-58 in the April 5 national semifinals, allowing the Terrapins to hang within single digits in the first half before pulling away in the last 20 minutes.
Again, Stewart led her team with 25 points, eight rebounds, four blocks and three assists. Teammate Morgan Tuck provided a lot of support, earning 24 points and nine rebounds.
That was just the latest in a long series of accolades for Stewart that grew in the weekend leading up to the Women’s Final Four. She received the 38th annual Wade Trophy, was named Player of the Year by the Associated Press and also garnered the Naismith Award, a clean sweep of post-season National Player of the Year honors.
In a season where UConn lost just once (in overtime, 88-86, at Stanford on Nov. 17), Stewart ran her career point total near the 2,000 mark, which she also accomplished at C-NS. She’s also fifth in school history with 288 career blocks.
She averaged 17.5 points, 7.8 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 2.7 blocks and 1.6 steals, hitting on nearly 54 percent of her field-goal attempts and better than 80 percent from the free-throw line.
Stewart was also the Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA East Regional, played not too far from Stewart’s hometown at Albany’s Times Union Center on March 28 and 30.
Averaging 27 points and 14 rebounds, Stewart and UConn routed Texas and rallied from a rare halftime deficit to beat Dayton 91-70. This followed opening-round NCAA games on the Huskies’ home court at Gampel Pavilion in Storrs where it flattened St. Francis (89-33) and one-time Big East rival Rutgers (91-55).
When she was still at C-NS, Stewart had told Auriemma that she wanted to win four national championships in her four years at UConn. Now she’s one successful season from meeting that high standard.
“When we first started talking about me coming to Connecticut, [Auriemma] knew what my expectations were and what I wanted to get,” Stewart said. “He said he would help me do that, but that it would take a lot of hard work.
“It has been a lot of hard work. But things have also turned out the way I wanted them to be.”
