INDIANAPOLIS — A college career is generally not long enough for an athlete to reach icon status. Nowadays especially, one doesn’t stay at one school long enough to justify the purchase of green bananas, let alone reserve this much space in a trophy case.
Alex Karaban arrived at the Final Four, one of only two seniors in Indianapolis who have played their whole careers at one school. He is already a symbol of this UConn half-decade of dominance, and he will leave as an icon, and not only in Connecticut.
It will be hard to imagine the Huskies without him.
“He’s the standard of UConn,” said freshman Braylon Mullins, who hit the winning shot against Duke in the East Regional final. “Anybody who puts on the UConn jersey, that’s the guy you want to look up to. He’s done it. He’s been doing it. He represents UConn so well.”
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Karaban enrolled at UConn early, in January of 2022, to get a head start on his freshman season. After one game playing off the bench, he’s been a starter ever since and has played and won more games, 125, than any player in UConn history. For these reasons, UConn broke with precedent and put him in the Huskies of Honor before his last game at Gampel Pavilion, Feb. 28.
The best, as far as individual performance, was yet to come. He’s been one of the guys, a good player on great teams, even as captain. But Karaban, once he became essentially a still-active program Hall of Famer, has risen to finish his career on an even higher level.
“Last year, having lost in the round of 32, you get an appreciation of how hard it is to get to the Final Four,” he said. “Just the difficulties each season presents, so it’s just enjoying it as much as the first two times I’ve been here and also just seeing the joy my teammates have, for a lot of these guys, just seeing the joy of making it to their first Final Four.”
The joy of the first Final Four came for Karaban in 2023 when the Huskies, who went into the tournament as a No.4 seed but were a fashionable pick to win it, defeated Miami and San Diego State and captured the program’s fifth national championship. Hurley proclaimed, “We’ve got our own,” as an homage to the championships won by Jim Calhoun, the program’s builder, and his successor, Kevin Ollie, before the three-year dip that led to Hurley’s hiring. In 2024, the Huskies were a loaded No.1 seed and fulfilled their destiny with wins over Alabama and Purdue.
Going into last season, with four starters gone to the NBA, Hurley was obsessed with the idea of a “three-peat,” which has not been done since John Wooden’s UCLA teams won the last of seven in a row in 1973, and he put a lot of pressure on Karaban to lead the way. When the season went sideways, Karaban often blamed himself. He was in tears after the Huskies were eliminated by eventual national champ Florida in the second round, saying he didn’t want to take the jersey off.
When he turned away from any pro opportunities for the second year in a row and came back, Karaban was liberated from all that pressure, and instead driven to pursue a third championship in four years with a joyful, reckless abandon. He was a role player, albeit a far-above average role player, on the other championship teams.
This one would be HIS own, for this is Alex Karaban’s team in every way imaginable.
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“He’s the greatest problem solver you’ll ever have in practice, in a game, and then, like, the tone he sets for your culture with his work habits,” coach Dan Hurley said. “The peer pressure that it puts on everyone in the organization when your best player works as hard as he does, it just puts enormous pressure on everyone to stay out of Ted’s (bar) at night, which is a bar on campus, and to be in the gym shooting.”
In this NCAA Tournament, with no Tristen Newton, no Cam Spencer, no Stephon Castle, Donovan Clingan, Andre Jackson, Adama Sanogo or Jordan Hawkins, Karaban has had to solve a lot of problems on the court, though senior Tarris Reed Jr., in his second season after transferring from Michigan, has been dominant.
But when Reed pointed to Karaban at a press coference and talked about “playing for this guy, a legend in a UConn uniform,” Karaban blushed and said, “Play for UConn, don’t play for me.”
In the first-round against Furman, with point guard Silas Demary Jr., out, Karaban hit a number of critical shots down the stretch as the Huskies secured the victory. In the second round, he scored a career high 27 points, then scored 17 against Michigan State in the Sweet 16.
When the Huskies were underdogs against top seed Duke in the Elite Eight, he was part of the team-wide shooting slump, missing his first five threes. But he put up his sixth shot at a critical moment, with UConn eroding Duke’s big lead.
And then came the most Karaban moment of all. Mullins fed him the ball with the clock running out, but Karaban, with two defenders closing in, dished it back to the freshman who hadn’t made a three the whole game. Mullins hit, and the captain who so embodies the unselfish, team-first attitude of UConn basketball, is back to try for a third championship ring.
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The UConn women won four in a row, 2013-16, with Breanna Stewart, Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson playing on all four teams, Stewart winning most outstanding player at all the Final Fours. That kind of run is unheard of in men’s basketball. Only eight players have won as many as three national championships, all played during Wooden’s UCLA run of 1974-75, led by Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who won titles in 1967, ’68 and ’69.
There are some, and I’ve been asked a few times, if UConn jumped the gun a bit by putting Karaban in the Huskies of Honor before the end of his career. Now that he has reached a third Final Four, any lingering questions about that are fading, and if the Huskies can beat Illinois, and either Arizona or Michigan, they will be moot. He is UConn’s ultimate winner, and he is an icon.
“It’s like having a top assistant that’s on your team and always around your players,” Hurley said. “He’s that mature with his approach. I’m just glad that, again, the decision to come back for this last year, that he’s been able to play as well, and his last kind of run has been fun. Obviously he’s improving his draft stock, and he’s established himself as the biggest winner and the most decorated player in UConn history. That’s hard to do at a place like ours.”
