The fourth-ranked UConn men’s basketball team closed 2025 in dominant fashion as it rolled to its ninth-consecutive victory with an 90-67 win over Xavier in Cincinnati’s Cintas Center Wednesday night.
The Huskies, now 13-1 and 3-0 in Big East play, had four players in double-figures led by redshirt-senior captain Alex Karaban, who finished with 19 points, seven rebounds, four assists, a block and two steals.
Freshman Braylon Mullins sunk five 3-pointers as he matched his career-high 17 points with six rebounds, four assists and a pair of steals. Solo Ball added 17 points after missing the Huskies’ last game before the holiday break with a wrist injury at DePaul, and Tarris Reed Jr. added 10 points with eight rebounds and a pair of assists in only 21 minutes.
Xavier, in its first year under head coach Richard Pitino, was overmatched from the opening tip and made just four of its 19 attempts from beyond the 3-point line as it dropped to 9-5 on the season and 1-2 in Big East play.
In a game with a focus on 3-point shooting, UConn made its first three from beyond the arc with Silas Demary Jr. (seven assists), Mullins and Ball hitting in the first four minutes while Xavier started just 1-for-7 from the field. The Musketeers went more than three minutes between made field goals as UConn capitalized in transition and built a 22-point cushion through the first 10 minutes.
“That’s how you start on the road,” coach Dan Hurley said post-game on the NBC Sports Network broadcast. “Take the crowd out of it, I mean, this is a hard place to play, we’ve had a hard time winning here. But we kind of came in here at a good time, Richard’s in Year One trying to rebuild this thing and I just thought that start, just we established some dominance quickly.”
A top-20 prospect? UConn’s Alex Karaban is having the most efficient season of his career
Xavier had no answer for the relentless effort from Karaban and Reed inside and the Huskies had no trouble feeding the ball in as the frontcourt duo repeatedly finished at the rim through contact, combining for 13-consecutive points to build the lead out to 33-8 at the nine-minute mark.
Everything was clicking for the Huskies, fresh off of five straight days of practice over the holiday break as they assisted on 14 of their 15 made field goals in the first half.
And even without a defensive specialist in Jayden Ross, who missed the game with hamstring tightness, UConn held Xavier, the second-best 3-point shooting team in the Big East (35.9%), to 0-for-10 from beyond the arc at halftime. UConn’s perimeter defense, holding opponents to just 26.2% from 3, entered the game fourth in the nation and best in the Big East.
Karaban, who had a game-high 13 points in the half, created space around a screen for a triple from the top of the key before Xavier found some fight and closed the half on an 8-2 run, shrinking its deficit to 43-28 at the break.
Pitino switched up his defense with a 2-3 zone to start the second half but Mullins took advantage with a pair of quick 3-pointers, which were separated by the Musketeers’ first made triple from Filip Borovicanin and another transition layup from quick guard Roddie Anderson III, who sparked the run into halftime.
Anderson got the crowd going as he bolted to the basket to make it a 13-point game, but Ball hit a silencer from beyond the arc, his second 3-pointer of the night. Ball had a stretch of “killer instinct” where assisted Eric Reibe (five points, seven rebounds) on an alley-oop layup, then blocked a shot and finished a layup through contact in transition, building the Huskies’ lead back to 24 points with just over 12 minutes to play.
Mullins’ mastery continued as he made his fifth 3-pointer of the game before Karaban passed Chris Smith for the fifth-most 3-pointers in UConn history as the 243rd of his career fell with just over four minutes to play.
“Every single game we’re getting better and better and it starts in practice,” Karaban said on the TV broadcast. “But to get to that championship level we’ve got to play a full 40 minutes and we didn’t do that, we poorly closed out the first half. But I really love the pieces we have, I love the depth that we have, I love how we can score in a variety of ways, defensively, we’ve shown our capabilities. We’ve just got to continue to get better.”
The Huskies will return to Connecticut for a matchup against a struggling Marquette team, still looking for its first power conference win, at Gampel Pavilion on Sunday.
