How to watch No. 5 UConn men's basketball versus Creighton

The UConn athletic department acted fast after coach Dan Hurley – and Georgetown coach Ed Cooley – commented on the lack of enthusiasm from the home crowd and some empty seats at men’s basketball games this season.

Immediate changes came for Wednesday’s game against Creighton that will allow students to transfer their tickets to other students if they cannot be in attendance. That should help fill Gampel Pavilion on a night where energy shouldn’t be hard to come by. The penultimate game on campus this year, it will be a white out with free T-shirts provided on every seat, $2 beers and posters will be given away to commemorate Emeka Okafor’s jersey retirement, which will occur during a ceremony at halftime.

The rest falls on the team, which moved back up to No. 5 in the national rankings this week.

“Our fans, they’ve supported me like no other college coach in the country. … They’ve been loyal to me through all the bullcrap, with all the narratives surrounding me and what type of person I am and with my on-court intensity. I’ve had their loyalty all the way through,” Hurley said after Monday’s practice, admitting his initial comments stemmed from the frustration of nearly losing the game “inexplicably” on Saturday night.

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“There might’ve been a better way for me to say it, I wasn’t like attacking or blasting my fanbase,” he said. “And then the other part of it is, you go back and watch the film and you feel like an ass because, like, we crushed the crowd. The times that the crowd tried to get involved in the game, we’d commit a bad foul, or players that are regressing defensively give up a basket. Part of why you have a great home crowd is you go on runs, and we haven’t been a team that’s been able to go on long runs – either because at different parts of the year we haven’t had the shot-making, or now the shot-making has improved and now our defense is sliding.

“When you go to see a college basketball game at UConn, it should be a unique experience.”

All of that to say, the environment in Gampel Pavilion on Wednesday night, with Creighton in town, is shaping up to be one of the best this season, potentially up there with the Arizona game back in November.

UConn had many long runs when it visited the Bluejays in Omaha on Jan. 31. It was their first real blowout victory after a month of Big East games that were closer than they should’ve been.

Braylon Mullins, Alex Karaban and Silas Demary Jr. each scored over 15 points as the team shot 16-for-31 (51.6%) from beyond the arc – it’s second-best 3-point clip of the season. The team went on a run at the end of the first half to build an 11-point cushion and kept going after the break until there was a 27-point difference in the final score (85-58).

Struggling with injuries and replacing two of the league’s best players in Ryan Kalkbrenner and Steven Ashworth, the year hasn’t gone as planned for coach Greg McDermott’s squad. Creighton lost three of four since hosting the Huskies and sits at 13-13 on the year, fifth in the Big East standings with a 7-8 record in the league.

“I don’t think there’s anyone that you ever have more respect for as a program that you coach against than Creighton and Mac and just their organization, the quality, the class. They had a major injury to a guy (Jackson McAndrew) that’s potentially one of the best players in the league to start the year, right as you’re in a brutal nonconference slate and things start going the other way. They had to deal with a lot of emotional things, too,” Hurley said.

Just days after hosting UConn in the annual Pink Out game for cancer awareness, Josh Dix, a preseason Second Team all-Big East wing, lost his mother to the disease. His teammates helped him deal with the loss, and he hasn’t missed a game.

“Prayers to the Dix family,” Hurley said. “Incredible hardship for everyone associated with the family and the program. Everyone is so close, it affects everyone. So, yeah, we’ve got the ultimate respect for Creighton so we know we can’t perform the way we’ve performed and get away with it.”

Addressing the inbounding

Part of the reason UConn has allowed teams back into games late stems from an inability to safely inbound the ball against pressure.

It almost cost the Huskies the game on Saturday when Karaban felt the five seconds ticking down, missed his read and tried to throw the ball off of his defenders leg and out of bounds to reset the clock. The plan didn’t work, but Georgetown couldn’t make him pay to the fullest extent from the free throw line.

“We work on it every single day, we work on press breakers, we work on handling the pressure when we go live against each other, so we work on that every single day,” Karaban said. “I think for myself, I’ve just got to make quicker decisions, I’ve got to pull the trigger. I’ve got to trust my teammates more when there is a gap that’s open to pass in the ball and just making sure I have eyes on everybody out there running.”

“It’s that,” Hurley agreed. “It’s also, of the four situations (on Saturday), I think twice we had players not move to get open and the referee was already on a two count. So what you’re always telling your players to do versus pressure is almost anticipate the referee handing the ball in and start moving so that you actually have more time to get open, not taking two seconds less. You’ve got to want the ball at the end of the game. That was where I’m like, ‘Can we bring Christian Vital back?’ I mean that guy, Tristen Newton, those guys wanted the ball. They wanted free throws at the end of the game. I think we had a little bit of not being able to pull the trigger, we had a little bit of kids nowadays not playing other sports, not playing dodgeball, not playing football, not knowing how to get open. Don’t know how to juke somebody. You gotta know how to get open.”