NEW YORK — Coming off the muddled, troubling end to the regular season, with two of their best wins, and their two worst losses within the last handful of games, the UConn men needed a play to start the healing process.
They came to the right place, and found the right Pitino.
“What I tried to do, we had a brutal film session on Sunday,” Dan Hurley said, “but I wasn’t as angry or animated. I was a little bit more sad. I think they were waiting for angry, mad Dan, but I did not give that to him. I just tried to remind the players we’ve been a top five team all year.”
A day after the loss at Marquette, it was a different Dan Hurley. The end of the game, in which he confronted the refs, getting too close, and eventually drew a $25,000 fine from the Big East? That was his “Chernobyl,” Hurley said, pulling out one of those references no one in an interview scrum would have their Bingo card. When you lose something you pour so much into, namely the conference regular season title, a coach feels as if he “died.” A couple of times, he referred to his team “choking away” the game at Marquette.
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Sad Dan, Angry Dan, Nuclear Dan … Agree or disagree with the demeanor, Hurley is one fascinating group of people.
“Coach just cares so much about this sport,” said Solo Ball, who scored 19 in the 93-68 win over Xavier. “That’s one thing you have to appreciate the most, just wanting to win so bad, and all of the coaches are like that. There was no difference between Sad Dan and Angry Dan, it’s just that when you have a coach that just cares so much, you just want to do anything you can to win.”
This taking nothing away from Xavier, which saved the Huskies from having to play Marquette five days after losing in Milwaukee. Marquette is a tough team for UConn to play. Xavier, at this point of Richard Pitino’s almost-from-scratch rebuild, is just a matchup that favors UConn. And, in this month where matchups matter almost above all, the Musketeers were able to eliminate the Golden Eagles in the first-round game, then the Huskies took care of business at Madison Square Garden. In three games this year, UConn beat Xavier by 23, 32 and 25 points..
“We don’t match up very well with UConn,” Xavier coach Richard Pitino said, “and that’s an understatement.”
Long and short of it, Tarris Reed Jr. had 17 points and 14 rebounds, and his backup, Eric Reibe an effective 13 minutes with nine points and four rebounds. With that much going on in the post, UConn got much better 3-point looks than at Marquette, where they were 3-for-12. On Thursday night in New York, they were 12-for-32, building a 22-point lead in the first half. They were getting to loose balls, getting in lanes and deflecting, disrupting.
“Going into the postseason, it is a new season, you’ve got to erase what you did before, whether it was good or bad,” Ball said. “And just capitalize. Trust your work, we’ve put in so much work since June, just continue to trust the work you put in, trust the process, and everything will just fall into place.”
Xavier chipped a little off the lead in the opening minutes of the second half, which brought out some Angry Dan– “We couldn’t be screwing around with this game, I hated the first eight minutes of the second half,” he said. But then UConn regrouped and won easily. The Garden going gets tougher for UConn (28-4), and we will know much more about their championship worthiness if they get Rick Pitino and St. John’s Saturday night.
But as the win-or-go-home portion of the season began, the Huskies cleared the first hurdle and did not allow the Musketeers to hang around and flirt with the idea of an upset, a mistake they’ve made several times this season.
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There was a big crowd, 19,812, mostly UConn fans, but it was a quiet night, just what the Huskies needed at this moment. No drama on the court, and little to none on the sideline. Hurley cast himself, self-effacingly, as the league’s “black sheep,” and (probably correctly) called the fine a “lifetime achievement” award, levied more for his history than this one dustup.
Despite their stellar record, their lackluster finish to the season had Hurley and his “Black Sheep Squadron” somewhat under siege on its way to New York. And they rallied around their coach, putting their NIL where their mouths were..
“This is the type of young men that I coach,” Hurley said, “they actually offered to pay part of the fine. They were raising hands, ‘I’ll give a thousand .. I’ll give $500 … $2,500. What a nice moment. Of course, I couldn’t accept it. It would be a violation.”
So no Go-Fund-Sad-Dan page ever launched, but the Huskies found a happy place and began to heal. That’s all a coach wants, when he could probably find the $25 grand fallen beneath his car seat.
“After that film, it was a little uncomfortable because you’re not used to it,” Reed said. “We all understand what happened in that Marquette game, what we lost, and we had to move on from it. We understood the job, we understood the mission, we understood what we had a hand in, coming into this tournament, we knew we couldn’t do that again. So each and every one of us understood the job we needed to do.”
