UConn men's basketball hosts Seton Hall on Senior Day

The UConn men’s basketball team has been in playoff mode since it lost to Creighton on Feb. 18, putting its Big East regular-season championship hopes in Jeopardy.

It responded on the road in beating third-place Villanova, then trounced St. John’s in its best performance of the season to create a first-place tie in the loss column. On Saturday, in the final home game of the year, Dan Hurley and his team will have to get through the emotions of Senior Day to beat fourth-place Seton Hall before closing the regular season at Marquette on March 7.

UConn needs to win out to clinch at least a share of the regular season title, barring another loss for the Johnnies.

There will be five seniors recognized on Saturday, highlighted by the program’s all-time winningest player, Alex Karaban, center Tarris Reed Jr., whose success, Hurley said, this season hinges on, and backup point guard Malachi Smith, who has come along as a contributor in recent games. Dwayne Koroma and Alec Millender, who each transferred in this year as graduate students and have been key to the locker room dynamic, will also be honored.

“I can be emotional, so I think I probably will cry,” Karaban said after he held back tears walking off the court in Hartford for the final time Saturday.

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Seton Hall, still looking for a win over a top-three team in the league, won’t be an easy out.

The Pirates have won three of their last four games and are on the wrong side of the NCAA Tournament bubble despite their 19-9 overall record. They nearly took down the Huskies for the fourth year in a row at home on Jan. 13, cutting an 18-point deficit early in the second half to just one in the final minute, but it was point guard Silas Demary Jr. – and potentially an Etsy witch hired by a fan – who sealed it for UConn down the stretch.

Mike Williams, a 6-foot-3 junior, made the Pirates’ only 3-pointer in that game to cut the deficit to one and finished with a season-high 16 points. He has only scored in double-figures in three games since. Adam “Budd” Clark, the team’s leading scorer averaging 12.5 points per game on the year, had 12 points in the first matchup, and freshman big Najai Hines had 10 points and seven rebounds off the bench. He has been inconsistent since, only scoring in double-figures twice since then, including a 12-point, 10-rebound double-double with five blocks in the team’s last outing, a four-point win over Georgetown.

UConn is 6-1 in its final home game over the last seven years with Hurley as head coach, winning all six since his first season in 2018-19.

The Huskies will look to continue riding their momentum with Reed as their engine. The best games of his UConn career have come back-to-back against Villanova and St. John’s.

“I hate to put it all on one player,” Hurley said. “But we’ve always needed Tarris to play like an All-American for this to work.”