Sports
Language barriers, culture shock, isolation: How NHL's loneliest players cope
Alexandre Carrier looked over at the stone-faced new guy to his left on the Gatineau Olympiques bench and noticed that he had another teammate’s stick in his hands. Ever the helpful sort, Carrier politely pointed out Yakov Trenin’s mistake. Trenin turned his head, stared at Carrier for a moment, and responded.
“Yes.”
Confused but also curious, Carrier then asked Trenin another question, one in which “no” was the only possible answer. Trenin again eyed him, expressionless.
“Yes.”
“I’m like, OK, he has no clue what I’m saying,” Carrier recalled with a laugh. “This was going to be a work in progress.”
Trenin was 17 years old when he left Russia to pursue his hockey dreams halfway around the world in North America. He had done his homework, too, taking classes to learn some rudimentary English so he at least could have a hope of understanding his coaches and fitting in with his teammates. The whole situation was terrifying.
Then he showed up in Quebec.
“I didn’t know they only speak French there,” Trenin said. “I was preparing for English and I get there and they all speak French.”
Trenin can laugh about it now, nearly a decade later. His English is excellent, and he’s in his fifth season with the Nashville Predators, with perpetual teammate Carrier owning the stall just across the Bridgestone Arena locker room. But when Trenin first showed up in Gatineau, he was the only Russian on the team — quite literally a stranger in a strange land. He knew nobody. He didn’t understand anybody. It was hard to make out the words the coaches were saying in team meetings. It was hard to communicate with his teammates on the ice. It was hard to fit in, to make friends, to hang out with the guys.
Carrier and the other Olympiques did their best to make Trenin feel welcome. They coaxed him into a volleyball match after a practice. They invited him to the movies “even though he didn’t understand a thing,” Carrier said. They spoke to him in their own sometimes-broken English, and Trenin — who was still new to that language and not very comfortable in it — found it easier to understand them than native English speakers because he found their accents similar to his own.
“You can’t really have a big conversation with him, so you try to just do stuff with him to make him feel part of the team,” Carrier said. “Just get him out of the house.”
Hockey is a global sport, and every time you walk into an NHL locker room, you’re liable to hear three, four, five different languages being spoken at once. Inevitable cliques form, too. The Russian players will have their locker stalls clustered together. The Czech guys on every team will all hang out away from the rink, piling into Bistro Praha for a taste of home when they roll into Edmonton. The Swedes and Finns are taught English throughout their childhoods and are usually at or near fluency, but they still congregate together and hide their conversations from prying ears by speaking their native tongue.
But not everybody has that social safety net. Sometimes, you’re the only Russian in the room, the only Czech, the only Finn, the only native French speaker. And whether you’re a teenager in juniors with no command of English or a 30-something trilingual NHL veteran, it can be difficult to be the only one from your country in the room. It’s isolating. Lonely, even.
“Sometimes, you just want to talk in your native language,” said 34-year-old Evgenii Dadonov, a 10-year NHL vet and the only Russian in the Dallas Stars room. “I can talk English, but I act a little different in Russian. I’m myself more. I’m not thinking too much when I talk and relax. In English, I’m always thinking and it’s harder to relax. It’s just something you deal with over here.”
Few players command a locker room the way Pierre-Édouard Bellemare does. He’s a big personality with a big voice, a big smile and a big laugh, and he’s everybody’s favorite teammate. As one of just two NHLers from France (Columbus’ Alexandre Texier is the other), he speaks flawless French and English, and he is fully conversant in Swedish, too. Teammates headed for summer vacations in Paris pepper him with questions and requests for restaurant recommendations. Others regularly chirp him about how “bougie” and “arrogant” the French are, and he gleefully gives it right back.
Approaching his 39th birthday and on his fifth NHL team, the Seattle Kraken, there isn’t a room in the hockey world in which Bellemare couldn’t fit in.
“I can come into a team really easily, talking to the Swedish guys or talking to the French-speaking guys or talking to the English-speaking guys,” he said. “It’s been my superpower.”
But back in 2006, Bellemare was a scared 21-year-old on the phone with his mom back in France, trying to hold back the tears because he hated walking through those doors. He had left France to play in Sweden’s second-tier league, one of the first Frenchmen to do so, and the transition had been soul-crushing. He had the skills and he had the work ethic, but he couldn’t communicate with anyone. He didn’t speak a lick of Swedish or English at the time. About the only Swedish word he knew was the one for French people, and he heard it often, usually under his new teammates’ breath as they laughed among themselves about the new guy.
The team in Leksand sent Bellemare and some of the Finnish imports to a professor’s house a few times for some basic lessons, but it was pointless, because, “At that time, I didn’t understand s—.”
“My first couple of months in Sweden were terrible,” Bellemare said. “Everybody was like, ‘Why are we bringing in a French guy? France has nothing to bring in hockey.’ This is how they saw me.”
If not for Bellemare’s mom, Frederique, his hockey career might have ended right there. But Frederique told him to embrace the challenge, that he was in Sweden not just to further his hockey career but to broaden his cultural horizons. So Bellemare broke through the language barrier like he was the Kool-Aid Homme. He learned both English and Swedish simultaneously, and shockingly fast — mostly through subtitles on movies and TV shows, as so many other international players do to hone their English once they get to the NHL.
“I was kind of in a panic mode to learn the languages,” Bellemare said. “I learned both languages really fast because I had no choice. The brain is such a wonderful thing. When you’re in a panic mode, he knows, he recognizes and suddenly you get abilities to learn a little bit faster. Nobody spoke my language, right? So I had to learn fast.”
Bellemare had to overcome more than just the language gap, though. The French had that “bougie” reputation in Sweden, too, and he had to overcome that resentment. The funny thing was that the Swedish league was the bougie one compared to what Bellemare had in France, where he was one of the country’s top players but was hardly making any money. In Sweden, he had free gear and free food. He had three hours of ice time every day instead of one. It was a hockey paradise compared to what he had in France.
So that became Mom’s advice: “Show those guys that they’re the ones who are all spoiled.”
“Once I started learning the language, they saw and said, ‘OK, this kid is trying,’” Bellemare said. “I became the hardest-working kid, and the happiest kid because I was in a sick locker room every day, with all this stuff I didn’t have back home in France. And all along, my mom was like, ‘How cool is it that a year from now, you’ll be trilingual?’ I was like, ‘That ain’t gonna happen.’ But it did happen!”
All these years later, Bellemare’s wife is Swedish and his kids, ages 6 and 4, already are bilingual, and “really close” to adding French to their repertoire.
“Like I said, it’s been a superpower,” Bellemare said, beaming. “Even though it was terrible at first.”
Unlocking the human brain’s massive potential isn’t the only silver lining that emerges from that kind of isolation. Rookie center Waltteri Merelä is the only Finn on the Tampa Bay Lightning roster, and while he admitted that he’d love to have one or two more in the room, it’s forced him to go beyond his comfort zone and make friends he might otherwise never have made.
Early in the season, Merelä and his wife learned that they live in the same neighborhood as goalies Jonas Johansson and Matt Tomkins, so they started hanging out. Now their wives and girlfriends have become close, too.
“When it’s just you, you kind of need to go find the guys that you’re going to hang out with,” Merelä said. “You don’t have that one guy you’re always hanging out with.”
Bellemare says he hasn’t experienced the animosity, othering and xenophobia in the NHL that he faced in Sweden. In his experience, the European players in the NHL typically bond over their cultural overlaps rather than focus on the divisions. There are Finns who played in Sweden, Czechs who played in Finland, Slovaks who played in Russia, Russians who played in Germany, and on and on. By the time they get to the NHL, many Europeans have a history with their new teammates, or at least some shared heritage to bond over. Which leads to a lot of good-natured chirping, particularly when a tournament like the World Junior Championship is going on.
The Swedish-Finnish rivalry is as heated as it gets, and that allows a rookie like Merelä to walk into the room and start giving it to a future Hall of Famer like Victor Hedman.
“Yeah, I can talk s— with him,” Merelä said. “But he’s always talking s— to me about Finland. It’s fun, it’s just a normal thing. It helps make you a part of everything.”
English is the universal language in hockey, the skeleton key to communication between nations. Many Europeans come to North America fluent, but nearly all can speak the language a little.
“The first few years, you just hang out with the Europeans,” said Buffalo’s Zemgus Girgensons, the only Latvian on the Sabres roster. “If you all don’t talk that great of English, you can talk to each other and help each other learn. You just manage, and try to learn English as fast as you can.”
In the rare instance when a player doesn’t speak any English at all, teams will sometimes go to great lengths to help them feel comfortable — especially for a potential star player. When the Blackhawks signed Artemi Panarin and brought him over from Russia for the 2015-16 season, they also signed Panarin’s buddy and SKA Saint Petersburg teammate Viktor Tikhonov, who grew up in San Jose, Calif., and speaks perfect English and Russian. Tikhonov could play, but he was brought over more to be Panarin’s friend and guide to America than he was to provide scoring depth. Once Panarin had his feet underneath him, Tikhonov was rather coldly traded to Arizona.
Some friends of the SKA Saint Petersburg program went so far as to set up Panarin with an interpreter, Andrew Aksyonov, who, along with his wife, Yulia Mikhaylova, were Saint Petersburg natives who had been living in Chicago. The couple picked Panarin up at the airport, took him into their home and showed him where to get groceries and the like. It was supposed to be just until Tikhonov arrived, but they became close, and the Blackhawks even hired Aksyonov to serve as Panarin’s interpreter.
Anything to make a player feel more comfortable because anxiety off the ice easily can spill onto the ice.
And that anxiety is real. Defenseman Nikita Zaitsev, now the only Russian in the Blackhawks room, said the hardest thing when he first came to North America, leaving Moscow in the KHL for Toronto in the NHL at age 25, was English slang and hockey vernacular. His English was quite good, but he kept hearing words he had never heard before, lingo that’s commonplace in the NHL but gets lost in translation. So he leaned heavily on the other Russian in the room, winger Nikita Soshnikov.
“You just want to confirm something, make sure you’re hearing the right thing,” Zaitsev said. “It can be hard. Sometimes you just want to talk to somebody in Russian. You need that. It’s always going to be hard, especially that first year.”
The culture shock, of course, goes beyond the language. If you come from a small town in Russia or Czechia or wherever and you land in, say, New York or Los Angeles or Toronto, it can be overwhelming. Merelä, for one, is grateful he ended up in Tampa — a real city, yes, but a more manageable one, with a laidback vibe.
“We don’t have really big cities in Finland,” he said. “There are a couple of OK ones, a couple hundred thousand people, but nothing like (North America). So this is probably one of the best places to play. You can figure it out pretty fast and it’s not that big. It’s easy to live here and the weather’s good and all the people are nice. Maybe if I went to some other place, it wouldn’t have been as good.”
Joining a new team is never easy. Joining a new continent is something else entirely. There’s so much to navigate, so much to absorb, so much to learn. And doing it while feeling isolated and alone is almost hard to fathom. So, in Girgensons’ words, “You manage. You figure it out.” Eventually, your new home becomes simply home, and teammates and friendships transcend borders and languages.
But still, even after fully assimilating into North American life, it’s always nice to have someone from back home at your side.
“It’s less of an issue now that I’ve been here a while, but it’s still easier to talk to somebody that speaks your language, and who you can talk to about the news going on in Russia,” Trenin said. “When (the team) brings someone from your country, it’s exciting. You stick together.”
Then he smiled.
“Even if you don’t really like them.”
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: John Russell, Bill Wippert, Christopher Mast / NHLI via Getty Images)
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The most glaring difference between a major- and minor-league stadium is in height. The newly renovated home of the Athletics, Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, Calif., carries just one main level topped by a second concourse of mostly suites, and in that way, it is still unmistakably the minor-league park it was built to be. But in a city that’s never regularly hosted Major League Baseball, the A’s hope intimacy creates an unusual draw.
Standing behind the press box on the ballpark’s top floor two days ago, Steve Sax, the 14-year major-league veteran who now does television work for the A’s, gestured into the distance, somewhere off behind home plate and third base.
“I grew up in West Sacramento, three miles as the crow flies, four miles that way,” Sax said, pointing to his left. “We were farmers. Just like when you fly into Sacramento, you see the farms. Growing up, I had so many dreams of playing big-league baseball. I thought, ‘Man, if someday they could have baseball in Sacramento, it would be unbelievable.’”
“Little did I know that they would not only have baseball, but they’d have it in West Sacramento, and it’s just — it’s absolutely mind-boggling to me.”
The A’s open the first of at least three seasons here tonight in a sold-out game against the Chicago Cubs, with an expected 13,416 attendees in a stadium heavily modified over the winter to accommodate its new tenant. This is the first season the A’s will play outside of Oakland in 57 years, and it is ultimately a layover between the team’s bitter exit from that city and the planned opening of a new stadium in Las Vegas.
West Sacramento is a separate municipality from the larger Sacramento, but the latter can be reached in less than 10 minutes on foot from the stadium, just over Tower Bridge. On either side of the Sacramento River, Sax said he feels a buzz about the A’s arrival. Yet, in the four days a reporter from The Athletic spent here, the overall reception in town felt muted and in many ways tentative, like the awkward early stages of a middle-school dance.
The A’s are sharing the ballpark with another baseball team, the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats, who began their season with three games Friday through Sunday. At the ballpark there was little visible indication that another, more prominent team was about to show up, beyond a purple “Las Vegas” tourism advertisement along the outfield wall.
Sutter Health Park will be the home of the A’s for at least the next three years. (Kirby Lee via AP)
All around town, in fact, the A’s green-and-gold was scarce. Along the Old Sacramento Waterfront, a tourist area filled with vintage trains and restored Gold Rush-era facades, just one large “Welcome” banner directed to the A’s stuck out.
Apparel stores in town, like the chain outfitter Lids, were still selling A’s shirts that say “Oakland” on it, the city the A’s just painfully left. Other clothiers were hawking unofficial “Sactown Athletics” hoodies and tees.
The latter are notable because the A’s do not actually want to be known as the Sacramento A’s during their time here, preferring to be known simply as the Athletics or A’s until they again take a city’s name in Vegas. The A’s uniforms will have a Sacramento patch on one sleeve, and a Vegas patch on the other, but will only have Athletics across the front. The Sactown shirts are selling well, one merchant said, but asked to keep specifics out of the newspaper, lest the team bring pressure to cease production.
“I’m calling them the Sacramento A’s,” said Sacramento mayor Kevin McCarty. “I’m gonna buy myself a Sacramento A’s jersey and hat very soon. They’re not going to call them that, but we can call them that.
“West Sacramento is calling them the West Sacramento A’s, but that’s fine too. That’s just a detail. They’re here. Professional baseball’s here.”
But it’s sometimes a tricky affair.
Over the weekend, some of the complexities of the A’s and River Cats’ stadium partnership were visible. Their arrangement is uncommon: They both share in Sutter Health’s construction and improvement costs, and will now share in some of the A’s revenues this season, said A’s vice chairman Sandy Dean, who declined to specify exact percentages.
“In less than a year, the A’s and RiverCats were able to conceive, design and implement all of the improvements that have been made to Sutter Health Park, including a grass field with a lot of technology supporting the best health of the field, new scoreboard, new lights, new batter’s eye,” said Dean, who owns a small stake in the team. “There’s a new concessionaire, there’s been upgrades to club seating. Although this is something that most people won’t see, there’s been infrastructure investments to facilitate a major-league quality broadcast, upgrades to the sound system.”
In all, the work cost more than $40 million, said people briefed on the process who were not authorized to speak publicly.
But the River Cats aren’t the only other team the A’s are dealing with in their new locale. The River Cats’ decisions ultimately run through the Sacramento Kings of the NBA, because both the River Cats and the Kings are owned by Vivek Ranadivé.
“To be able to get all that done from start to finish and be ready for Opening Day here on March 31, 2025, is a great accomplishment by the River Cats and Kings who oversaw all of that,” Dean said.
Over the past few days, the A’s, the Kings and the River Cats played a game of political football trying to figure out just who could speak publicly about the construction work that had been done. The relocation of the A’s has long been a sensitive topic, and sensitivities haven’t disappeared in a new town.
The A’s are proud of the changes made to the stadium itself, particularly considering the short period in which they had to build, and the effort appears to have been earnest. A new two-story home clubhouse, one the A’s day-to-day clubhouse staff had a hand in designing, and a brand-new grass field have been installed.
The A’s new clubhouse (Courtesy of The Athletics)
But the A’s ultimately did not lead the day-to-day work at the park. The River Cats and Kings did. Kings spokesperson Kari Ida said The Athletic could interview one of its executives only if the team could approve which quotes were used in advance of publication. The Athletic declined to conduct an interview under those terms.
The Kings have rarely commented publicly on the stadium project, an interesting choice when Ranadivé and others in Sacramento want to show the city could someday host a full-time MLB team, one that isn’t set to leave in a few years.
“We really think this is going to be a trial run for us to show that we’re ready for two professional sports teams in Sacramento,” said McCarty. “Certainly we’ve succeeded with the Kings for the past 40 years, supporting that team in thick and thin. Obviously the A’s have the arrangements, they’re about to finalize starting to build a stadium in Nevada. Some would say (that’s) not locked in yet, but that’s probably happening.
“But expansion is a potential. You know, the commissioner of baseball used the word ‘expansion’ a few weeks ago when he visited, which really struck me.”
One of the early sensitivities in the A’s relocation here surrounded the kind of field they would use. At first, MLB and the team planned to put in synthetic turf, but players and their union successfully lobbied to change the plan. Players find grass to be easier on their bodies, and also cooler.
“It’s not a secret that players prefer playing on natural grass across the board,” said Murray Cook, president of BrightView Sports Turf and MLB’s official field consultant. “Everybody knows that and the players know that.”
Cook said he never felt that synthetic turf could not work. Developments in natural grass have led it to take on characteristics typically associated with turf, like increased durability, and by the same token, turf has in some ways become more grass-like.
Durability is the largest concern with two teams playing on the field virtually every day for six months, because big-league fields aren’t supposed to turn brown or look worn out, and Sacramento is hot during the summer.
The River Cats play their home games when the A’s are out of town, and some of the minor-league team’s home games have even been relocated to Tacoma, Wash., in June, to allow a break for resodding.
The grass that was installed is called Tahoma 31 Bermudagrass, which Cook said gets greener earlier in the spring, and stays greener later into the winter. It has been overseeded with a rye grass, which grows better at a lower temperature, aiding the field’s look earlier in the season. There’s also an air pump system that both promotes growth and helps dry when it rains.
Back-ups are in place. Cook said the league has access to a second overseeded rye field for repairs, and a third field that’s only bermudagrass.
“It is a little bit uncharted to have a major-league team, a minor-league team share a field for an entire season,” Cook said.
To Ian Webster, a college student who wore an A’s shirt on Saturday to work, the area has little in between when it comes to the new baseball team.
“It feels very much like either you kind of don’t care, or you care a lot, one way or another,” Webster said. “There’s very few people who are just like, ‘Oh, cool. The A’s are coming to town.’ Either you don’t care, or you’re really happy they’re coming town, or you’re very hurt by the fact that they’re moving at all.”
On Friday, the day of the River Cats’ home opener, only a handful of fans wore Athletics gear to Sutter Health Park. That was not unsurprising, because the River Cats today are affiliated with the other Bay Area team, the San Francisco Giants. But there are plenty of A’s fans around, and some are happy they’ll get to see their team more often.
“I feel good because we don’t have to drive all the way out to Oakland to see the A’s play,” said 10-year-old Ezekiel Velez, whose favorite all-time player is the late Rickey Henderson. “We don’t have to drive like an hour and a half, two hours, to see the A’s play.”
Keefe Mahar wore a River Cats shirt to the stadium the same day with a standard green A’s cap, with one modification. Yellow tape spelled out the world “Sell” over the team’s logo.
“Very mixed,” Mahar said of his emotions about the team’s relocation. “Lifelong A’s fan. I wish they would just stay in Oakland. But also, it’s dope that they’re right down the street. I can ride my bike over and go to a game.”
Keefe Mahar and his family at the Sacramento River Cats game. (Evan Drellich / The Athletic)
Neither Mahar nor Annjanette Branca, who works along the waterfront, had kind words to share about A’s owner John Fisher. He and the A’s believe the team did all it reasonably could to remain in Oakland; many fans do not agree. How much protest there is inside the ballpark about the move this season is one of the great open questions as the A’s begin their Sacramento era.
Both the home and visiting players will ultimately judge the stadium renovations, along with the fans. The A’s aren’t hurting to sell tickets — the season-ticket allotment is sold out, at roughly 6,000, they say. Ranadivé said in 2024 that he wanted the A’s to be the “most sought-after ticket in America.”
But the greater construction project will be in reaching those in the area who are ambivalent, at least for now. Beth Devine, a rideshare driver here, said she was only interested in the A’s arrival so that her family could come see the New York Yankees.
“I think people are more into Sac Republic to be honest with you, which is the soccer team,” Devine said while driving a reporter to the park last week. “I don’t think they really care that much about the A’s, because they’re not ‘the Sacramento A’s.’ It’s just three years.
“The Sacramento people are like, ‘What if they stay? Wouldn’t that be awesome?’ That’s what we would like. That’s how Sacramento is, like the bridesmaid.”
(Top photo of the Athletics’ new jerseys: Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)
The U.S. Department of Education has given Maine a final warning to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban trans athletes from girls’ sports.
The DOE sent a letter to the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) on Monday advising a final deadline of April 11 to address the issue or risk a second referral to the Department of Justice. The Department of Health and Human Services already referred Maine to the DOJ last week.
“The Maine Department of Education’s indifference to its past, current, and future female athletes is astonishing. By refusing to comply with Title IX, MDOE allows—indeed, encourages—male competitors to threaten the safety of female athletes, wrongfully obtain girls’ hard-earned accolades, and deny females equal opportunity in educational activities to which they are guaranteed under Title IX,” the letter read.
“Under prior administrations, enforcement was an illusory proposition. No more. The Trump-McMahon Education Department is moving quickly to ensure that federal funds no longer support patently illegal practices that harm women and girls.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to MDOE for comment.
HHS’s Office for Civil Rights announced Friday that it had referred Maine’s “noncompliance” with Title IX rules to the DOJ for enforcement, including the MDOE, Maine Principal’s Association and Greely High School, where a trans athlete who won a girls’ pole vault competition attends.
CALIFORNIA LAWMAKER WARNS DEMOCRATS OF CONSEQUENCES FOR NOT PROTECTING GIRLS’ SPORTS FROM TRANS ATHLETES
The Maine School Administrative District 51, home to Greely High School, where a transgender athlete incited national controversy after winning a girls’ pole vault competition in February, said Thursday it was not complying and will instead “continue to follow state law and the Maine Human Rights Act.”
The Maine Principals’ Association said in a statement it is also “bound by the law, including the Maine Human Rights Act, which our participation policy reflects.”
Maine has become a national battleground over the issue shortly after the state indicated in early February that it would not follow Trump’s executive order.
The situation involving the trans athlete at Greely High School attracted national attention after Maine Republican state Rep. Laurel Libby identified the athlete by name with a photograph in a social media post. Libby was later censured by the Maine legislature, and she has since filed a lawsuit to have it overturned.
The issue with Maine came to a head at a meeting of the National Governors Association on Feb. 20, when Trump threatened to cut federal funding to the state for not banning biological males from girls’ and women’s sports.
The next day, Mills’ office responded with a statement threatening legal action against the Trump administration if it withheld federal funding from the state. Then Trump and Mills verbally sparred in a widely publicized argument at the White House during a bipartisan meeting of governors.
Since then, multiple protests against Mills have been held outside the state Capitol, and the Maine University System has cooperated with the Trump administration to ensure no trans athletes compete in women’s sports after a temporary funding pause.
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SPOKANE, Wash. — The answers had run out. The worst case had caught up to USC, at the worst time.
There was no more outrunning the reality looming over this entire NCAA tournament, not with Paige Bueckers at the height of her powers and the full weight of the Connecticut onslaught raining down on them. Without JuJu Watkins, there was no further the Trojans could go. And once again, it was Connecticut which slammed the door, ending USC’s season in the Elite Eight once again with a 78-64 victory.
The Huskies will face UCLA next weekend in the Final Four, while the Trojans are left to wonder where they go next without Watkins.
At every turn, until Monday, USC found an answer for her absence, scratching and clawing their way through two tournament rounds. In the round of 32, it was Kiki Iriafen who came alive in her stead. In the Sweet 16, it was a pair of freshmen in Avery Howell and Kennedy Smith who rose to the occasion.
But this trip, without Watkins, will be tinged forever with questions of what could have been.
There is no way to know how far USC might have gone if Watkins’ right knee didn’t buckle beneath her a week ago. But USC did all it could to keep that unlikely journey going.
Rayah Marshall, playing in her final game at USC, finished with 23 points and 15 rebounds, playing the game of her life when it mattered most.
But all that worked in the previous two rounds suddenly came up short. Iriafen struggled, scoring just 10 points. The freshmen did, too, as Smith and Howell combined to shoot four of 15 from the field.
Back in December, USC had bested the Huskies on their home court in an early-season classic. But the Trojans had their star then — Watkins led all scorers with 25 — and the Huskies lost just one more game before Monday.
USC forward Kiki Iriafen shoots over Connecticut forward Sarah Strong during the first half Monday.
(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)
The matchup closely resembled last year’s Elite Eight loss, as Bueckers went off for 31 points, two more than she had against the Trojans last March.
USC tried to work the ball inside early, in hopes of getting Iriafen off to a good start. Fresh off her worst game of the season, Iriafen delivered six quick points in the game’s first six minutes, and USC took control early. Marshall took over from there on the inside, as the pair combined for 16 of USC’s first 17 points.
But turnovers began to pile up, and the Trojans’ promising start dissolved in a four-minute scoreless drought at the end of the quarter, just as Connecticut freshman Sarah Strong found her stride. While USC zeroed in on Bueckers, Strong scored 10 of the Huskies’ first 12 points.
For a while, the Trojans slowed Bueckers, who scored 40 in her previous outing, by chasing her with Smith, their most tenacious on-ball defender.
But Bueckers kept patient, and eventually broke loose. In the final 38 seconds of the half, she knocked down one three-pointer, then another, giving the Huskies a 39-25 lead at the break.
The barrage continued from there. Iriafen went cold after her strong start, failing to score again until late in the third quarter. The freshmen who carried USC in the last round stayed quiet. Connecticut pushed its lead to 19, threatening to bury USC.
The Trojans would unleash their suffocating press on defense, sparking an 11-0 run to end the third quarter. They cut Connecticut’s lead to just five.
But that was as close as USC would get. And now it will have all offseason to wonder what might have been.
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