SPOKANE, Wash. — The first week after Paige Bueckers tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee in August 2022, the unanswered questions haunted the Connecticut star most.
“The first week was devastation,” Bueckers recalled Friday, two and a half years later. “A sense of just hurt, disappointment, a why me sort of mentality, why now.”
For Azzi Fudd, her Huskies teammate, the days after her two ACL tears were spent mostly in stunned disbelief.
“[You’re asking yourself] like, why did this happen?” Fudd said. “How did this happen?”
Those same questions have surely been swirling around in JuJu Watkins’ mind since Monday, when the USC sophomore star’s right knee buckled beneath her during the first quarter of the Trojans’ second-round win over Mississippi State. Watkins was carried to the locker room, and later an MRI would reveal that she sustained a torn ACL, according to a person familiar with the diagnosis not authorized to discuss it publicly. The injury not only ends her season just as USC’s tournament run is beginning, but also will presumably require her to sit out well into next season.
It’s unclear how long the recovery journey will be for Watkins, who is the latest of the sport’s rising stars to suffer a season-ending knee injury. The timing of her injury is particularly devastating for USC, which is set to face No. 5 Kansas State in the Sweet 16 on Saturday night, and for women’s college basketball, which stood to benefit greatly from having Watkins’ starpower on the sport’s biggest stage.
For USC, it means adjusting to life without the focal point of its offense, a Herculean task that Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma knows all too well. His Huskies had to adjust without Bueckers during the 2022 season, then Fudd during the 2023 season.
Auriemma said the impact of Watkins’ absence on the tournament was “huge from a competitive standpoint.” But after going through similar experiences in the past, women’s basketball’s winningest coach said the best way for a team to recover is to “move on and everybody just do a little bit more.”
“The danger sometimes is one or two people on the team start to want to be like JuJu,” Aueriemma said. “I’ll do all the things JuJu did. And then that takes them out of their character and they play worse.”
There’s just no way to fully replace the gaping hole that her absence leaves in USC’s lineup going forward. But for Watkins, this first week will undoubtedly be the hardest to weather. After that, Bueckers and Fudd said they started to reframe their mindset around the injury.
“Then your motivation, your strength, your faith, peace kicks in [that] everything happens for a reason,” Bueckers said, “and then surgery happens, and then you know that every single day that passes by is a day closer to you getting to play basketball again.”
It’s going to be a while before Watkins approaches that point. The Times spoke to two orthopedic surgeons with extensive experience treating knee ligament injuries who spoke generally about the recovery process for female college basketball players. Both agreed that a normal recovery would presumably take between nine and 12 months.
Where Watkins falls in that range could prove especially consequential for USC next season. Nine months would put her return in late December. A 12-month timeline would extend into the 2026 NCAA tournament; though, there’s no guarantee Watkins would choose to play in that either.
During the past decade, the process of determining when an athlete is ready to return to play has become more “objective” and “scientific,” according to Dr. Andrew Cosgarea, an orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins. That’s generally meant a more careful approach to bringing an athlete back.
“We’ve gotten much better at not just looking at it as a specific window, like, ‘OK, nine months and now you’re ready,’” added Dr. Gabriella Ode, an orthopedic surgeon at the HSS Sports Medicine Institute and team physician for the New York Liberty. “There’s going to be a lot of differences from person to person in that recovery process. There’s nothing wrong even with a 12-month recovery. I want to be very explicit about that. There are many people who it takes 12 months.”
That was the case for both Bueckers and Fudd during their respective returns at Connecticut. Bueckers tore her ACL in August 2022 and was cleared by early August 2023, before making her debut in November.
The first time Fudd tore her ACL in high school, she needed just nine months to return to the floor. When she tore the same ACL and her medial meniscus last November, it took her a full year to recover.
Even still, it took Fudd time to find her footing early in this season. When USC traveled to Connecticut and took down the Huskies in late December, Fudd played just eight minutes and scored zero points, missing all four of her shots.
It’s a delicate balance, bringing a star player back from serious injury. Female athletes, for various physiological reasons, are between two and eight times more likely to tear their ACLs, and that risk — in both knees — grows exponentially within two years of a previous ACL tear.
“Probably the worst thing that an athlete can do is go back when they’re not ready,” Ode said.
Many athletes do eventually return from their ACL injuries stronger than ever, with hamstring and quad muscles fully fortified around their surgically repaired knee. That’s the outcome the women’s basketball community is expecting from Watkins.
“She will come back better and stronger,” UCLA coach Cori Close said. “I don’t have any doubt she will look back on this and go, ‘You know what, in the long term, it actually made me a better basketball player. And I grew a ton as a young woman.’”
That’s how Bueckers and Fudd both look back on their own experiences. But both know how difficult the road ahead will be for Watkins. Especially in the first week after the injury, with her team still in the tournament.
“We empathize for her, we’ve been there, and we know how much it sucks,” Bueckers said. “But you don’t get to be as good as JuJu if you don’t have a great motor, a great work ethic, and she’s going to attack this process just as she’s attacked basketball, and just as she’s great basketball, she’s going to be great at this.”