UConn men keep surviving Big East battles, and there’s a lot to be said for that

Dan Hurley made his way off the PeoplesBank Arena floor Saturday only to be stopped by his Hall of Fame predecessor.

“I think Coach (Jim Calhoun) rattled off about four or five things that we suck at,” Hurley said, in the aftermath of UConn’s 75-67 win over Villanova in Big East men’s basketball. “I just wanted to ask him how he was feeling and thank him for being there and tell him I love him and appreciate everything he was able to do. Then I quickly went into the locker room and put all the stuff he said in the notes section of my phone.

“I actually bypassed the team and went right in and put those notes down.”

Surely this was a critique worth listening to, worth acting upon. Others, perhaps, not so much. These Huskies, more than any team in recent memory, just can’t seem to win for winning.

“We’ve found a way to win so many times, and that’s just another one,” said Alex Karaban, who scored 17 points, all coming in the last 9:03 of regulation and the five-minute overtime. “We’ve just to learn to not put ourselves in those positions.”

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After championships in 2023 and ’24, and a second-round exit last season, UConn is up against these monstrous expectations, not only to win every game, but win easily, especially with the league not up to its usual metrics. This, if one only takes a deep breath, is absurd.

This team is 19-1, with 15 wins in a row. The program has won all six of its national championships since a winning streak of that length, in 1998-99 starting 19-0. UConn is ranked second in the country, it’s only loss coming to top-ranked Arizona, without two of its starters.

“We’re not at UConn to just to be satisfied because we’re 19-1,” Karaban said. “We always nitpick and see what we want to do better. But at the same time, we’ve got to take a step back and realize we’ve put in a lot of hard work. Yes, these games have been close and we find ways to win, but we’re grateful and blessed to be 19-1 and we’re just going to stack wins.”

The Huskies are 9-0 in the Big East, a game up on St, John’s, though several of the wins were high-wire acts like this one. They came from a double-digit deficit to win at Providence, fought off a furious rally by Seton Hall to win there, and struggled to outlast Georgetown. But UConn has not gotten benefit of the old notion that conference wins on the road are supposed to be hard to get.

Here, before a sellout crowd of 15,495, the Huskies spotted the much-improved Wildcats, playing like a tournament team again in Kevin Willard’s first season as coach, an 8-0 lead, and never delivered that knockout run until the very end, outscoring Villanova 14-3 to finish the game. There is too much talent for all of them to be cold for 40 minutes. Solo Ball, on Coaches vs. Cancer day, saw his mother, a cancer survivor, in the stands and went out and had a huge game: 24 points, 5 for 12 on 3-pointers, 5 for 5 at the line.

The Huskies lost Braylon Mullins, who took an elbow to the side of the face and went into concussion protocol, and lost Tarris Reed Jr., who fouled out in OT. They had several empty possessions down the stretch and Hurley was called for a technical that ended up helping Villanova restore its lead to six points early in the second half. Jayden Ross missed a couple of key free throws with two minutes left and a series of empty possessions kept UConn from winning in regulation. In particular, they failed to get off a potential winning jump shot in the last possession, with 11 seconds to do it.

Oh, but here we go again, looking another hard-won conference victory in the mouth. Not even Hurley was going that route Saturday.

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“I think we’ve got a will to win,” Hurley said. “We don’t have an ability to sustain the level of basketball we need to play at both ends of the court to be like we were in ’24. Sometimes, as a coach, that last great team you have, you’re kind of measuring your team up against. The deficiencies we have here, I feel like its more like the ’23 team, things we’re still working through.”

The 2022-23 team started out 14-0, then lost six of eight when conference play began in January, then went on to win it all. That would be a good comp for this team, except for this one thing: The current Huskies have not lost six out of eight, they’ve lost zero out of nine. At least four times now, these Huskies have looked cooked, and managed to win.

So while they haven’t shown the generational dominance of the year before last, haven’t shown that oft-mentioned “killer instinct,” they has shown a survival instinct, impressive in its own right and just as essential for a legit championship contender. So go ahead, nitpick the degree of prosperity if you will, that’s your right. And you know how these things go? Eventually, they will lose a game, and then the “I-told-you-sos” come out. But take a breath, take a step back and acknowledge there’s a hell of a lot more to like, than not like, with this team, a ratio of 19 to 1, matter of fact.

“You can’t take the joy out of it,” Hurley said. “It was a joyful locker room, a lot of tears. We had a bunch of kids from Connecticut Children’s hospital in there, we visited the hospital during the week and we’ve got a relationship with the kids and the families there, we go see them, they’re in our locker room, we’re in their room. I thought a lot of the strength in those kids and the battles they fight manifested itself with our team today, to will ourselves to win.

“We play for a lot of people in Connecticut. I’m going to watch the film, you’re going to see the ways we shot ourselves in the foot, see the mistakes, dying on screens, not getting the defensive rebounds, getting a lead not being able to step  in. Listen, we’re 19-1, we’ve won 15 in a row, we played a heck of a nonconference schedule, I’m not going to take the joy out of being in a great spot.”