The women’s basketball universe has been aflutter overnight because of the result of the NCAA Division I women’s semifinal between South Carolina and Connecticut.
More to the point, it’s what happened after the game, when head coaches Geno Auriemma and Dawn Staley got into a verbal altercatiion in the handshake line.
Auriemma, during an in-game interview, intimated that his team was getting fouled repeatedly with no calls made by the refereeing crew.
But I’ll posit this. No team in a basketball game — at any level — is going to win a game when the shot chart in the second half looks like this:
Yep, Connecticut went 2-for-16 in the second half in the paint.
Sure, you can talk about emotion, physicality, and McDonald’s All-Americans all day and night. But it’s the players on the court that win or lose games.
And so often, coaches can lose them.