UConn on late foul call: Not the reason we lost

CLEVELAND — UConn coach Geno Auriemma said illegal screens could be called “on every single possession” but stopped short of directly criticizing officials for a controversial offensive foul call that helped decide Iowa‘s 71-69 victory in Friday’s women’s Final Four.

“I just know there were three or four of them called on us, and I don’t think there were any called on them,” Auriemma said. “So I guess we just gotta get better on not setting illegal screens.”

The Huskies had possession trailing 70-69 in the waning seconds of a thrilling back-and-forth showdown. But UConn’s Aaliyah Edwards was called for the offensive foul with 3.9 seconds remaining as she screened Iowa’s Gabbie Marshall in an attempt to get star guard Paige Bueckers open for a game-winning shot.

“My point of view, it was pretty clean,” Edwards said of the screen.

UConn never got the ball back, as the Hawkeyes rebounded Caitlin Clark‘s missed free throw on her second attempt and ran out the clock. Iowa will play in the national championship game for the second straight year on Sunday against South Carolina (3 p.m. ET, ABC), which took care of NC State 78-59 earlier Friday to move to 37-0 on the season.

Bueckers called the illegal screen “a tough call” but didn’t blame it for UConn’s loss.

“Everybody can make a big deal of that one single play, but not one single play wins a basketball game or loses a basketball game,” said Bueckers, who tied Edwards with a team-high 17 points. “You can look at one play and say, ‘Oh, that killed us or that hurt us.’ But we should have done a better job — I should have done a better job of making sure we didn’t leave the game up to chance like that and leave the game up to one bad call [not] going our way and that deciding it.”

Iowa coach Lisa Bluder said she didn’t have a good look at the screen but countered that Clark “really didn’t have freedom of movement” with UConn’s Nika Muhl blanketing her all game. Clark went 0-for-6 from 3-point range in the first half but still finished with 21 points.

Clark praised Marshall for coming up “with the huge defensive stop for us” by forcing the foul while chasing Bueckers.

“The game is physical,” Iowa forward Hannah Stuelke said, with Clark nodding her head beside her. “It’s basketball. Sometimes the refs are going to call it. Sometimes they aren’t.”

Coming out of the timeout going into UConn’s final possession, Marshall said she thought she could force an illegal screen if she just stayed on Bueckers’ hip as the Huskies tried to get her open for the last shot.

“A great call,” Marshall said. “And I’m happy that that happened because it was a huge stop — and we needed it.”

Though he was less than thrilled with the foul call, Auriemma acknowledged there were other reasons the Huskies lost, pointing to their failure to grab the rebound on Clark’s missed free throw in the final seconds.

“Whether they were right call, wrong call, we had no control over the call on the screen,” Auriemma said. “But we had control over whether we got the rebound or not. So we had an opportunity at the very end, and if we secured that rebound, now we have one more chance to win the game, and we didn’t do it. You can say all you want, and yes we should have won the game, but we didn’t deserve to win the game by the way we played the last couple of possessions.”