UConn head coach Dan Hurley huddles with his team, including guard Solo Ball (1), forward Liam … [+]
On Saturday, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team dominated an inferior opponent, something the program is accustomed to over the past few years. The Huskies won by 54 points over the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, a team that fell to 2-9 and is 361st among 364 Division I programs, according to analyst Ken Pomeroy.
It was a welcome return home for UConn, but really didn’t mean anything. The victory certainly didn’t erase any lingering bad feelings from the Huskies’ trip to the Maui Invitational last week, where they went 0-3 and had their first three-game losing streak since January 2023. The result certainly wasn’t what the Huskies expected. After all, they have won the past two NCAA championships and were ranked second in last week’s Associated Press poll. They will almost certainly be unranked when this week’s poll is released on Monday afternoon.
After Saturday’s victory, UConn coach Dan Hurley told reporters the Huskies will no longer play in three-game multi-team events like the Maui Invitational and will only play home and home series against top opponents or single-game events in major arenas.
Sour grapes? Perhaps. But before last week’s disappointment in Maui, UConn athletic director David Benedict told longtime CT Insider beat writer David Borges that the Huskies were “evaluating our scheduling model,” while Hurley said the Huskies must “maximize the non-conference slate” both from a revenue and competitive standpoint. Traveling to Maui may sound like a fun trip, but Hurley clearly didn’t seem thrilled to be there even prior to the event starting, as Borges chronicled.
When the games began, it got much worse. The Huskies lost to Memphis. 99-97, in overtime on Monday, a game in which Hurley was assessed a technical with the score tieed at 92-92. Hurley referred to the call as “a joke.” A day later, UConn lost another close game, this time 73-72 to Colorado. Hurley again criticized the officials for a no-call late in the game.
On Wednesday, the game against Dayton didn’t come down to the officiating. The Flyers dominated UConn, winning 85-67 and making an already difficult trip for the Huskies even more disastrous.
“When you come to a tournament like this and it’s three games in three days and it starts to go bad, there’s no way of fixing it because there’s no time to,” Hurley said. “You just have to deal with the situation. It was a humbling trip obviously for a program that’s accomplished what we’ve accomplished.”
The Dayton loss was UConn’s worst non-conference defeat since December 2018 when the Huskies lost by 23 points against Villanova at Madison Square Garden. Back then, UConn was a member of the American Athletic Conference, while Villanova was the reigning national champion. Now, the Huskies are back in the Big East and looking to become the first team since UCLA in the early 1970s to win three consecutive national titles.
During the preseason, the Huskies were considered to have a shot at accomplishing the three-peat even though they graduated four starters from last season. All four of those players (Stephon Castle, Donovan Clingan, Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer) were selected in the NBA draft in June.
Alex Karaban, who averaged 13.3 points per game last season, is the only returning starter, but UConn was ranked third in the preseason AP poll because of Hurley’s coaching acumen and the players he and his staff brought into the program. UConn added freshman guard Liam McNeeley, a potential top 10 pick in next year’s draft, as well as transfers Tarris Reed (a 6-foot-10 forward from Michigan) and Aidan Mahaney (a guard from Saint Mary’s). And they returned senior reserves in center Samson Johnson and point guard Hassan Diarra and a talented sophomore class led by guards/wings Solomon Ball and Jaylin Stewart. Hurley even turned down the Los Angeles Lakers’ job in June to return to college and join legendary UCLA coach John Wooden as the only coaches to win three consecutive NCAA championships.
UConn started this season winning its first four games by nearly 38 points per game, but those routs came against Sacred Heart (310th in KenPom’s rating), Le Moyne (329th), East Texas A&M (350th) and New Hampshire (358th). Despite the lopsided victories, Hurley wasn’t always pleased, including calling the 35-point win over East Texas A&M “comically bad.”
Six days later, the Huskies played their first game in Maui, a trip that couldn’t have gone much worse. After the Dayton loss, longtime college basketball writer Andy Katz asked Hurley what he and his staff could fix in the short-term. Hurley said he didn’t know, but he added that “we’ll be fine” on offense and called the defense “a disaster here for us.” The numbers bear that out, as UConn is sixth in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency metric and 83rd in the adjusted defensive efficiency metric. That compares with first in offense and fourth in defense last season and third in offense and seventh in defense two seasons ago.
UConn returns to action on Wednesday night when it hosts Baylor at the XL Center in Hartford. The Bears (5-2) were ranked 17th in last week’s AP poll and have lost to Gonzaga and Tennessee while defeating Arkansas and St. John’s. It is another test for a Huskies squad that has had trouble playing together and dealing with the expectations. There is still plenty of time remaining, as evidenced two seasons ago when UConn went 2-6 during an eight-game stretch before regrouping and winning the national title. A three-peat could be asking too much for this year’s UConn team, but Hurley and his assistants will do all they can to get things back on track.
“The burden of wearing the uniform after back to back (national titles) right now looks like it’s weighing heavy on the group,” Hurley said after the Dayton loss. “Right now, we’ve just got to focus on becoming a good team and becoming a tougher team….Right now, we’re a shell of what we’ve been.”
