It isn't a question of whether the UConn women's basketball team will be short handed when it visits No. 20 Maryland on Sunday, but how short handed the sixth-ranked Huskies will be.

The number of players available for No. 6 UConn (7-1) will land somewhere between six and nine. Dorka Juhász (broken left thumb) missed her sixth straight game when she sat out Thursday's contest with Princeton. Nika Mühl (head) did not play the final 17 minutes against the Tigers and Lou Lopez Sénéchal (foot) sat out the last four minutes of the 69-64 win.

There were no updates from UConn Friday or Saturday.

Who's left? The five on the floor down the stretch Thursday — Aubrey Griffin, Aaliyah Edwards, Caroline Ducharme, Amari DeBerry, and Inês Bettencourt — along with Ayanna Patterson.

"If you had said to me that you had to prepare to have this lineup in the game the last three minutes of the game, I'd say, 'That is not possible,' " UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. "Sometimes the only way you can prepare for something like that is to actually be in it that situation and see how you handle it.

"I don't know that we handled it great. I don't know that we're going to be proud of what we see on the film. I think when Nika went down it was really a lot on some of the guys. But at the end when we had to make a couple plays, make a couple shots, and make a couple free throws, we managed to do what needed to be done at that particular time to win the game.

“That still means a lot because it could have very easily been where you feel bad about the situation you're in and then lose the game, as well."

The Huskies saw a 15-point fourth-quarter lead cut to two in the final 30 seconds. But a Bettencourt foul shot, a defensive stop, and two free throws by Bettencourt with 2.9 seconds to go allowed them to escape.

"As the game's going on, the only thing you can talk about is the next play we have to make," Auriemma said. "We didn't have time to go over everything we wanted to fix, because there was just so much. So you have to be, 'Let's just make the next play.'

"You don't know how you are going to handle certain situations until you are put in those situations. When they look back, they're going to realize, 'I'm not really proud of the way I handled myself, but I also made some things work when I needed to make them work.' We had a kid who never plays make some free throws at the end."

UConn has been in a similar situation before.

The Huskies had seven scholarship players available for a game at Maryland on Nov. 15, 2013. But five of them — Stefanie Dolson, Bria Hartley, Breanna Stewart, Moriah Jefferson, and Kiah Stokes — would go on to be WNBA first-round draft picks and a sixth, Saniya Chong, would play in the WNBA. The seventh, Brianna Banks, had one of her better games in her time at UConn as the Huskies rolled 72-55 over a Terrapins' team that ended up in the Final Four.

UConn went 40-0 and won the national championship.

Neither Dolson, Hartley, Stewart, nor Jefferson will be walking through the doors at the Xfinity Center Sunday to help out.

"It's not about Xs and Os, it's about the mindset that they're going to have to all of a sudden acquire," Auriemma said. "Will they be able to do it? I don't know. We will be able to do it as a coaching staff. We can put something together as to how we're going to attack Maryland, how we're going to try to defend them. But in terms of can we get our team to believe we can score enough points given who we have sitting on the bench? That's going to be a tough sell.

"Then again kids surprise you, and hopefully they will surprise us."

UConn will be playing its second true road game. The first was a loss at Notre Dame.

"We're aware of what happened last Sunday," Lopez Sénéchal said. "Now we're prepared and we know how it was for our first away game. It's not going to be a surprise. We just have to be aggressive and confident from the start."