STORRS – There weren’t many smiles to go around the UConn practice facility on Monday night, after the Huskies’ first practice since they saw their 18-game winning streak snapped by St. John’s at Madison Square Garden on Friday.
It was a long, solemn bus ride home from Manhattan after the game, during which coach Dan Hurley frustrated himself all over again as he tried to get through the film.
“It was a tough film session, obviously it was hard to watch on the bus. It causes you, with the team, to be very concerned,” he said. “When you can’t defensive rebound free throws and you can’t make free throws, and then you can’t take care of the ball, and you lose a game that you shoot 55% from the field in, and you can’t guard the paint against a team that does a lot of its damage in the paint and you prepared to guard the paint.”
“Any time you lose it’s jarring,” he said. “No matter how the season has gone.”
Hurley wants the entire program to hurt after a loss.
That much was clear on Monday.
“You want everyone to feel some level of, ‘I don’t want to ever feel like this again,’” he said. “That’s part of why teams win championships. Because the players and coaches, collectively, they hate losing to the point where they never want to feel like that, so they give the extraordinary efforts so that you can win championships.”
UConn’s struggles against the Johnnies didn’t come out of nowhere.
Throughout the first half of the Big East season, the issues were there. The team was turning the ball over too much, not playing tough enough on the boards or defensively in the paint and letting teams hang around late into games. But the Huskies were able to get by the league’s inferior teams.
They started to put everything together in back-to-back blowout wins leading up to the St. John’s game, even letting the idea of running the table in the league creep into their mind.
“I gotta be better with the ball. Nine turnovers is unacceptable. … Just got to be better, smarter decisions and just being aware of defenders getting up underneath me,” Silas Demary Jr. said at the start of his media scrum.
“When you run off that many (wins) in a row, you kind of get the feeling of, ‘Man, I don’t think anybody can stop us.’ And I think having that attitude kind of hurt us, because we still got to respect the opponent and respect what the opponent has done,” the Huskies’ point guard said. “But I feel like you get a certain confidence when you’re on a winning streak like that.”
Hurley and his staff had been drilling the team on its areas of weakness as the close calls kept coming. They were able to overcome them and sneak out of every game until the recurring issues came back as a slap in the face on Friday night.
“Over the past couple months or weeks, the coaches have been wanting us to do this, wanting us to do that, and we’re constantly not doing it. So at some point it was gonna come back and bite us, and it did,” Demary said. “So now we’ve got to really hone in on what we need to fix and fix it as soon as we can.”
Because of the way the schedule played out, the team was forced to have Saturday and Sunday off before they could return to practice. Most of the team was in the gym anyway, many of them shooting free throws after the troubling 5-for-12 effort from the line.
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They made sure to get their recovery in and prepare their bodies for the final eight league games, beginning with a visit to Hinkle Fieldhouse, a historic venue that always seems to give UConn teams a hard time, to meet Butler on Wednesday.
How simple of a fix is it?
“I mean, being able to defensive rebound a free throw is not something that should be a problem. We do rebounding drills every day. Being able to make free throws is probably a tougher thing to do as a coach, because it’s a combination of, ‘Are you a shooter?’ and then, ‘Are you confident?’” Hurley said. “Free throw shooting is very difficult for a coach to fix, you rep it.
“The defense, I mean, to give up 60% in the second half, majority coming in the paint, not being able to guard the paint. Those are things that we’ve got to be able to fix. But they were at every level, from the guards to the wing defenders to the centers, at every layer of defense we had problems protecting the paint.”
Much of Hurley’s frustration comes from the fact that the team has been together, working on all of those areas since the summer.
With the Big East Tournament only four weeks away and March Madness following soon after, the program’s sense of urgency was heightened after the major wake-up call at the Mecca.
“We’ve been working incredibly hard since June to play championship-level basketball. And we’ve played it at other moments during the year. We got punked,” Hurley said. “When you get your ass kicked like that, there’s gotta be a response. There’s got to be some type of a championship response. Where’s that gotta come from? That’s got to come from your leading players. It’s gotta come from Tarris Reed, it’s gotta come from Alex Karaban, it’s gotta come from Solo Ball. We always got those responses from Cam Spencer and Donovan Clingan – any adversity in-season from championship-level players and teams, they respond.”
