NEW YORK – Alex Karaban and Samson Johnson took over down the stretch as the UConn men’s basketball team pulled away from Villanova for a 73-56 win in the quarterfinal round of the Big East Tournament Thursday night.
Johnson set the screen that cleared the way for Karaban’s fourth 3-pointer of the game and Karaban returned the favor, assisting his big man for a tough finish through a foul. It was all part of a vintage 22-5 scoring run to close the game as the Huskies’ lead rapidly swelled to as many as 19 points in the final minute.
“We’re desperate for championships here, so we want to play our best basketball right now. There’s no better time,” Karaban said, acknowledging that the run felt similar to the dominance the program had gotten used to over the last two years. “Wearing that UConn jersey, you have to take honor and pride with it and play with that swagger. Especially in March now, there’s no better time to give everything you’ve got.”
UConn, competing for its ninth Big East Tournament title, will meet No. 2 seed Creighton in Friday’s semifinal round, which features No. 1 St. John’s and No. 5 Marquette on the opposite side of the bracket. It will be the program’s fifth-consecutive Big East semifinal appearance and 17th all-time.
Coach Dan Hurley was encouraged by the fact that his team only trailed by five at halftime on Wednesday, given the way its defense struggled in allowing Villanova to shoot 43.5% from the field and get to the free throw line 16 times.
“We were able to just put some game pressure on them, finally get the lead, and really execute well and get stops, and go plus nine on the backboard,” Hurley said. “These games have pressure. These are pressure games now when you get to this where it’s like, for players and coaches, like, your last conference game of the year. You don’t want it to be that.”
Villanova went just 3-for-20 from the field over the final 16 minutes of the second half and Karaban led the Huskies in capitalizing on the defensive stops as he scored 15 of his team-high 18 points in the second half, making all four of his shots from the field, three from beyond the arc. The captain added nine rebounds and six assists, half of which went to Johnson, who scored 11 points on 5-for-5 shooting.
The veteran duo set the tone from the first possession as Karaban found Johnson for a dunk to start the game. Johnson caught and finished an alley-oop lob from Hassan Diarra two possessions later.
“You get a big dunk, you get a big stop to start the game, the opposing team is gonna start getting rattled,” Johnson said. “This is what we do at UConn, man. We work all year for moments like this.”
Villanova’s senior guard Wooga Poplar had control of the game through the first 25 minutes, driving past the Huskies’ perimeter defense as he scored 23 of his game-high 25 points before anyone else even scratched double figures.
Poplar hit a stepback jumper to start the scoring for the Wildcats two and a half minutes in, beginning a 17-4 run over the next six minutes to take a nine-point lead.
Karaban finally ended UConn’s 0-for-6 drought from beyond the arc as he nailed a 3-pointer from the left wing. Another drought ended less than 30 seconds later.
Hurley, who hadn’t received a technical since his infamous “T” during the first game of the Maui Invitational in November, voiced his disagreement with a foul call against Aidan Mahaney during a media timeout. It was just his second technical foul this season.
He later claimed the technical was a calculated effort to even out the foul calls. At that point, UConn had been called for five and Villanova just one.
It didn’t exactly have that result, though it seemed to have ignited a fire under his players as they made seven of their next 11 shots to close the opening half. Mahaney, who provided 10 solid first-half minutes and was repeatedly praised by his head coach after the game, hit a corner 3-pointer and picked the pocket of Eric Dixon before racing down the court for a layup that cut UConn’s deficit to one.
Mahaney and Jaylin Stewart scored seven points a piece as UConn finished the game with a 19-2 advantage in bench points.
Dixon, the nation’s leading scorer at 23.6 points per game, was held to a season-low eight points on 2-for-15 shooting. His first made field goal, and his only made 3-pointer on seven attempts, came in the final two minutes of the first half as he and Poplar sent the Wildcats into the break with a 36-31 lead.
“I thought we made very few mistakes,” Hurley said. “And, honestly, for (Dixon) it was just probably one of those nights. Obviously Samson did a great job, Alex did a great job, Tarris (Reed Jr.) did a great job. But I just think, as great of a player as he is, and as unhuman as he’s looked a lot of the time, the season he’s had has been so incredible. I think we were fortunate, too, to get him on a night where he missed a couple.”
Back-and-forth to start the second half, Solo Ball (11 points) trading shots with Poplar, UConn wasn’t able to tie or take the lead until Karaban landed his second 3-pointer and Mahaney made a sweet left-handed layup high off the glass, which tied it at 46 with less than 11 minutes to go.
Playing from behind since the 14-minute mark in the first half, Karaban put the Huskies in front with a pair of free throws and Liam McNeeley (12 points, 7 rebounds) finished a tough layup around Dixon to make it a 51-48 advantage with 8:29 to go. The Huskies continued to run, their lead growing to seven as Karaban and Johnson traded buckets and gave the crowd its first opportunity for a “U-C-O-N-N” chant as McNeeley waltzed around the court puffing his chest.
The Huskies shot 65% (13-for-20) from the field in the second half, 5-for-8 from beyond the arc as their lead ballooned to as many as 19 points in the final minute.
“It definitely had little flashbacks of last year when we’d go on those big runs,” Karaban said. “But it was more so just trying to go possession-by-possession, just break them down slowly… We made a lot of mistakes in the first half, whether it was fouling or letting Poplar get to the rim easily or missing a ball screen defense. So we just tightened those mistakes up and we just took more pride on the defensive end in the second half.”
“They were just intense,” Villanova coach Kyle Neptune said of the reigning Big East Tournament champs. “They made it hard for us to catch, made it hard for us to get to our sets. They just came after us.”
Friday’s semifinal game against Creighton, another team the Huskies split their regular season series with, is set to tip-off at 9 p.m. on FOX.
Originally Published: March 14, 2025 at 12:34 AM EDT
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