UConn associate coach Chris Dailey was talking about the fifth-ranked Huskies’ inordinate amount of turnovers in the context of a renowned idiom.

“Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness.”

UConn (11-2 overall, 4-0 Big East) leads the nation in assists with 21.0 per game, behind junior point guard Nika Muhl, whose 9.6 assists per game also leads the country. Muhl has recorded double-digits six times this season, something no other UConn player has ever accomplished.

And yet the Huskies are averaging 17.4 turnovers per game, carrying a streak of seven straight games with 15 or more into Tuesday’s league game at Butler (6-8, 1-4) in Indianapolis (7 p.m., SNY).

“That’s probably true,” Dailey said. “With Nika, her greatest strength is how hard she plays and that stubborn mentality. And that’s also your greatest weakness when you try to make the same play over and over again and it’s just not open.”

UConn junior forward Aaliyah Edwards leads the team with 40 turnovers. Muhl is next with 39. The Huskies had 17 in Saturday’s 61-48 victory over Marquette, led by five from Caroline Ducharme. It took just 13 seconds into the game for the first UConn turnover, a travel call on Lou Lopez Senechal.

It’s something head coach Geno Auriemma has addressed often. On Saturday, he was asked what can be done to fix the turnover problem.

“I don’t know,” Auriemma said. “There’s got to be a fix for it. I just don’t know what it is ... because I’ve never had to fix it. There’s been times in the past where we’ve had crazy games earlier in the season but not at this point where we’re still making some of the decisions that we’re making with the ball and it goes into shot selection as well.

“You take a bad shot, an ill-advised shot at the wrong time, that might as well be a turnover. So it may look like we had 15 or 17 on a given night, it could be 25 if you add in all the poor decisions that you make.”

UConn has had a short bench since star guard Azzi Fudd’s knee injury at Notre Dame on Dec. 4. Fudd, projected to miss 3-6 weeks, is nearing her return, which should take some of the pressure off Muhl, who has played an entire 40 minutes four times this season.

Dorka Juhasz missed seven games with a broken left thumb and Aubrey Griffin has missed the last two after testing positive for COVID over the Christmas break. Auriemma used seven players against Marquette.

Muhl is willing to take the blame.

“I feel like I’ve been the main part of the turnover part. There’s definitely been games where I haven’t handled the ball pretty well,” Muhl said. “I haven’t led the team offensively as I wanted to. I feel like me, personally, I just need to get better at that, which comes from just practicing and being aware of that in practice.

“I don’t feel like teams are playing us that aggressive to the point where they make us turn the ball over. It’s just been us being lousy at times. We’ve been playing with a short rotation. We get tired. You can tell we get lousy with it. We can’t let ourselves do that.”

Muhl said she gets “a little too excited” at times, especially with the talented players she has as targets for her potential touchdown passes.

“I always want to make that pass,” Muhl said. “I hear coach yelling on the sideline, like, ‘No, no, no, stop. Don’t pass, don’t pass.’ I’m like, ‘All right, all right.’”

Auriemma said there’s a danger to the other side, too: the possibility of the team being too conservative, too passive and not taking any chances.

“We score a lot of points and it’s remarkable we score a lot of points how many times we throw the ball away, how mindless we are with the ball at times,” Auriemma said. “We’re averaging 17 turnovers a game; that’s the most in the history of our program. You just say to yourself, ‘What would our offense look like if we made better decisions and took better care of the ball?’”

Butler, which lost at Seton Hall 79-45 Saturday, is led by 5-foot-10 graduate guard Rachel McLimore with 11.8 points per game and 6-3 forward Sydney Jaynes with 10.2.

v.fulkerson@theday.com