Paige Bueckers is back in Connecticut like she never left! Making TikToks with her ex-teammates, running drills with the Huskies, albeit from the other side as part of the practice squad, and, of course, trading playful jabs with her former head coach. The moment she reunited with Geno Auriemma on stage, the first thing he said to her was, “Who pairs white socks with black shoes?”

Well, that right there summed up the whole Geno–Paige relationship. The back-and-forth kept rolling all night, and eventually Geno got real about one of the things he both loves and agonizes over in Paige: her, uh, delightful delusion!

Geno went way back and laid it out. “After all those losses, we would go back as a coaching and me personally I would go….This did not hurt enough. I could tell on Paige’s face that it did not hurt enough for her to change and come back the following year and be a different person, a different leader. And it has to hurt.”

Look, we all know the story: after that iconic four-peat, UConn spent years chasing the kind of dominance that used to feel like breathing. Then Paige arrived, the No. 1 recruit who stunned everyone by becoming the first freshman to win Player of the Year. Still, Geno felt something was missing: the kind of loss that actually makes you spit fire and change. 

He was serious underneath, but obviously, he had to say it with his trademark jokes.

“Now, that’s one of her biggest strengths. She’s delusional,” he continued. “And one of her biggest strengths is that she doesn’t let anything shake her confidence. She’s the most confident human being, probably, that I’ve been around for a long, long time.” And yet Geno admitted the hard truth. “There comes a point where losing has to really, really, really hurt to your core, to who you are as a human being. And I never thought she felt that.”

Well, because Paige had had enough of March Madness heartbreaks. She lost in the Final Four as a freshman, fell in the national championship as a sophomore, missed the next season entirely with injury, then watched another semifinal slip away before returning for her final run. But still she was her confident self. 

And this word “delusional” isn’t being linked to PB for the first time. Geno even joked during March Madness that Paige acts like she’s never fouled anyone and the refs are always wrong. But beyond the laughs, he wasn’t kidding this time: something had to make Paige actually hurt. 

How Geno finally made Paige Bueckers feel the “hurt”

Do you remember the matchup when No. 5 UConn faced off against No. 19 Tennessee? The Huskies came in at 21-2, while the Volunteers were 16-5. But it was Tennessee that stole the show, edging UConn 80-76.

Four of Tennessee’s five starters scored in double digits, while Paige Bueckers contributed with 14 points. After the game, Auriemma didn’t sugarcoat anything. “The bottom line is we have some players on our team that are supposed to be our best players and they’ve got to play better. That’s all there is to it,” he said.

Naturally, everyone assumed he was calling out Paige. But while some criticized his rotations and late-game adjustments, it turns out it was intentional.

Geno explained, “and that Tennessee game was my opportunity to say, look, we’re going to go one way or the other. So I took a shot at it and said she’s either going to quit, transfer, or go downhill, or she’s going to change. So I tried to hurt her.”

He admitted this might have been the first time in her career that Paige truly felt the kind of hurt needed to fuel growth. “And that was it for me. I mean, I took a calculated risk, I thought. And to her credit, she took that and became maybe one of the best NCAA Tournament players ever and national champion,” he said.

Many UConn greats have talked about how Geno breaks his players down to rebuild them stronger, and he did the same with Paige, trusting that she could not just handle it, but thrive because of it. The results speak for themselves: across five NCAA Tournament games, Bueckers averaged 26.4 points on 55% shooting, including 52% from deep, while dominating both as a playmaker and a defensive force. 

Clearly, the tough love worked wonders.