A look back at when Jalen Brunson buried UConn

The March glory of the past few years has dimmed, if not obliterated, memory of that “blue period” of UConn men’s basketball. Maybe the low point was Jan. 20, 2018, when Villanova, the old Big East rival, came to Hartford on a Saturday afternoon.

The Wildcats were ranked No. 1 in the country. UConn, destined for a 14-18 season and a coaching change, was in the American Athletic Conference, but a sellout crowd showed up hoping for a miracle and a little nostalgia.

You know what those folks got? Jalen Brunson — a full dose of Jalen Brunson. Villanova humiliated UConn, winning 81-61, after building out a 31-point lead. It got so bad at times, when Dan Hurley replaced Kevin Ollie as coach after the season, he showed the team film of that game, stopping to blurt out, “THAT CAN’T HAPPEN” over and over.

“You just keep shooting,” Brunson said that day, after scoring 23 points, going 9 for 16, including 5 for 11 on threes. “Just keep shooting and don’t worry about it.”

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Ollie, who’d played with Rick Brunson, said Jalen was “a little better than his Dad.”

Mikal Bridges was also with Villanova that day, and Donte DiVincenzo, others who later joined Brunson on the “Nova Knicks.” The Wildcats went on to win the national championship, their last under Jay Wright. The Knicks, by way of intersection, lost to the Lakers the next night, 127-107, en route to a 29-53 season, one of their long line of forgettable seasons.

Outside of Villanova doing great things that year, it would have been hard to imagine that dreary day for fans in Hartford that eight years later Brunson, still shooting and not worrying about it, Bridges and another ex-Wildcat Josh Hart would be together with the Knicks, and Brunson would be the leader as the franchise shed decades of mediocrity and disappointment and reached the NBA Finals. They’ve won 11 in a row against the Hawks, 76ers and Cavaliers and now await the Western survivor, Oklahoma City or San Antonio, to play for the championship. And there all kinds of random thoughts are floating around.

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These are strange days, indeed, and in the best possible meaning of the phrase for the Knicks. Full disclosure, I am among those who, roughly a year ago, lambasted the Knicks’ decision to fire New Britain’s Tom Thibodeau as head coach. I said it, I wrote it, I was wrong and I own it. I just decided to take a half dozen or so paragraphs to get around to admitting it here.

However, there is always a certain amount of serendipity in sports, especially at moments like this. If you recall, the Knicks were targeting Jason Kidd to replace Thibodeau, but Dallas would not let Kidd leave. The Knicks turned to experienced Mike Brown, which came off like Plan B at best, but while Brown has done a masterful job in coaching to his personnel’s strengths and leading the franchise over the playoff hump that tripped up Thibs, the Mavericks flamed out and fired Kidd last week. So now he’s available. Strange days, indeed.

It’s also strange, perhaps, that Madison Square Garden is called “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” and “The Mecca of Basketball,” and yet its occupants, flagship NHL and NBA franchises, have passed this way so seldom. The Rangers have won one Stanley Cup since 1940, even though they were in a six-team league for much of that time. I confess to being alive when the Knicks won their championships in 1970 and ’73, with no memory of the first, vivid memories of the second. Even those born years after can name the starters: Walt “Clyde” Frazier, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, “Dollar Bill” Bradley, Dave DeBusschere and Willis Reed. When they were all out there healthy, symphonically executing Red Holzman’s strategy, the Knicks were near unbeatable. They caught a break for sure when the Celtics’ John Havlicek injured his shoulder in Game 3 of the Eastern finals, but dismantled the Lakers of Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Gale Goodrich and … Pat Riley in five games in the last round.

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You can’t overstate what the championship teams of that period, those Knicks, the 1969 Mets, Super Bowl III champion Jets, the 1977-78 Yankees, meant to the city, which was decaying everywhere at the time, careening toward bankruptcy and the famous tabloid headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”

The Knicks’ runs to The Finals in 1995 and ’99 were overshadowed, the first by O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco and the Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets, the latter by the Spurs’ Tim Duncan-led dynasty.

The Liberty’s WNBA title a couple of years ago interrupted a long championship drought among the city’s pro teams, and the vibe right now tells you what an eruption it would be, what a spectacular Canyon of Heroes parade would ensue if the Knicks could pull this off.

… But this is Connecticut and back to UConn we must loop like a Seinfeld episode. There are UConn-made obstacles between the Knicks and the ticker-tape parade New York covets. Oklahoma City, the defending champ, had the look of a dawning dynasty when it beat Indiana in The Finals last year. Head coach Mark Daigneault started as a student manager at UConn, and got into coaching with the mentorship of Jim Calhoun and George Blaney — who played for the Knicks in 1961-62.

The Spurs have one of the league’s rising stars in UConn’s Stephon Castle, whose one year in Storrs was 2023-24, year of the repeat championship, one of the greatest college basketball teams of the generation. Assistant coach Mike Noyes was a walk-on at UConn, and he was there on the bench on Jan. 20, 2018, the day Brunson and the future Nova Knicks clobbered the Huskies in Hartford.

Maybe all of this represents some cosmic full-circle moment, the Knicks’ time come at last. … Maybe it’s just a series of disjointed coincidences and factoids. … Maybe it’s that splendid serendipity of sports. … Or maybe we should just be watching and enjoying the moment.