STORRS — Coach Dan Hurley listened to what seemed like the 100th question referencing the circumstances and the confounding game-within-the-game statistics that doomed the UConn men’s basketball team to defeat Wednesday night.
He smiled, laughed, picked up the stat sheet and playfully tore it in two, letting the pieces flutter off where they may. Not in anger, mind you as Hurley’s must-see interviews are rarely angry, even postgame. They’re more therapeutic for him; entertaining for the rest of us.
“Sometime around 2 a.m., 3, 4:30 a.m., I’m going to wake up and think it was just a nightmare,” Hurley said. “And then finally when I’m up and starting to move around, feeling half dead at 7:30, 8 o’clock, I’m going to realize that, ‘Yeah, we just blew a chance to beat one of the best teams, down two studs, in a game where we were down 13 and wobbling.’
“Our people have to get guys heathy and on the court so we can be the team we’re all high on. It’s just that (Wednesday) sucked.”
Shorthanded UConn men fall to No. 4 Arizona 71-67 in top-five showdown at Gampel Pavilion
UConn losses in basketball are rare enough enough to always be surprising, shocking when it happens at Gampel Pavilion on a $2 beer night as the noise level threatens the structural integrity of the arena’s troublesome dome.
“Great atmosphere,” said Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd, in the building for the first time. “I’d love to see what this place is like on $1 beer night — $2 beer night was pretty impressive.”
The Huskies’ 71-67 loss to Arizona, ranked fourth in the nation, is not the end of the world, but if it feels that way for the 10,000 plus who left the building, the students who’d been camping outside for days to gain admittance and the countless fans beyond, that’s allowed. That’s UConn, after all, the BC-dub, “Basketball Capital of the World.” Haven’t you heard?.
UConn, ranked third, after winning national championships in 2023 and ’24 and being eliminated only after giving eventual champ Florida all it could handle in the second round of March Madness in 2025, has high hopes for this season, high hopes that are justified. Believing this will not be a long process with several pitfalls along the way, however, is neither justified nor realistic.
“Multiple things can be true,” Hurley said. “Brutal loss. Just because we fought so hard to get a lead down the stretch. … Tough loss, we could have stole it, literally stole it, against a high-level opponent. Lack of sleep tonight, one we could have stole in what could have been an incredible win for us.”
That this game would have to be “stolen” became apparent when word started wafting out on the internet that Tarris Reed Jr., the Huskies’ center, was injured; later confirmed when the team began warming up. A high ankle sprain kept Reed on the bench against an opponent when his A game, not just his presence, would be vital to the Huskies’ hopes.
Freshman Eric Reibe was left to tangle with Arizona’s experienced 7-foot-2 center, Motiejus Krivas, without a safety net. With the Wildcats’ size advantages at other positions and caliber of talent, Hurley predicting five of them could be in the NBA one day, this was going to be a bear of a challenge.
Those aforementioned game-within-a-game numbers: Arizona had 43 rebounds to UConn’s 23, outscored the Huskies in the paint, 43-24, in second-chance points, 16-5. The Huskies were going to have to offset that with perimeter points, but were 8-for-25 on 3-point attempts. To make matters worse, UConn missed half of 18 free throws. Depth is a perceived strength, but UConn got only seven points from nonstarters.
And yet, and yet, and yet, the Huskies somehow had a chance to win this game. Trailing by 13 in the second half, they staged a rally, tying the game at 60 when Reibe hit a 3-pointer with 3:56 to go, made a stop and took the lead next time down the floor on Jaylin Stewart’s basket. If it had been $1 beer night, the state might be taking bids on roof repair today.
Down three with 13 seconds to go, the play UConn drew up went awry, but Reibe drew a foul as his shot hung tantalizingly on the rim, falling out instead of in, for what might have been a game-tying sequence. And that was that, a game of centimeters.
How did that happen? On a night when everything seemed to be wrong, UConn very nearly made it come out right. They had only eight turnovers, had 15 assists in 25 baskets and, most importantly, saw Reibe, 19 years old, 7 feet 1 from Germany, come of age among and against the grown men of 2025 college basketball. This will be important when they have both he and Reed available.
The Huskies also showed a toughness belied by the rebounding numbers, the kind of toughness they showed in Boston last weekend when they made big plays down the stretch to beat another top-10 team, BYU. Former Huskies great Caron Butler, now a coach in the NBA, visited their locker room to tell them how proud he was.
So this UConn team definitely has something, even if Dan Hurley wasn’t necessarily in the mood to extol such virtues after the game. He called for a new, increased level of rage for the Huskies’ next game, against Bryant on Sunday night. What the Huskies didn’t have was Reed, their All-American-caliber center who would have closed the rebounding gap, or Braylon Mullins, their freshman sensation-in-waiting who might’ve picked up the slack on a night when Solo Ball went 1 for 8 on 3-pointers and Alex Karaban got off only five shots. Mullins has been out with an ankle sprain, too.
“We’re becoming the ankle sprain capital of the world and the muscle pull capital of the world,” Hurley said, rather wryly. He has assembled a minefield of a November-December schedule, with No. 24 Kansas, No. 8 Illinois, No. 10 Florida and 4-1 Texas coming up. UConn needs all its weapon to run through that and keep its designs for a No.1 seed in the NCAA Tournament intact.
But overall, Tuesday was not such a bad night in the old “BC-dub,” even if it felt like it. If the Huskies can come this close to a top-five opponent without vital players, they have a lot to look forward to when they are whole again. And trust me, if Hurley, 52, is waking up at 2, 3, 4 a.m. just to rehash the basketball just played, he’s way ahead of game.
