NEW YORK – Solo Ball is beginning his junior season as one of three UConn men’s basketball players on the All-Big East first team. His expectations for himself are even higher, hoping to help the Huskies win another national championship, earn All-America honors and join Steph Castle as members of UConn’s 2023 recruiting class chosen in the first round of the NBA Draft.
Ball expects to be one of the best shooters in the nation after a sophomore year that saw him make fourth-most 3-pointers any UConn player ever has in a single season, tying Rip Hamilton (1997-98) and Cam Spencer (2023-24) with 99.
But coach Dan Hurley has made it clear that his success, and the team’s, will start on the defensive end.
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“He’s challenging me every day,” Ball said at Big East Media Day Tuesday, remembering how Hurley quipped that he deserved an award for how bad his defense was last November, and never held back on pointing him out throughout the season.
“I’ve been watching a lot of film, I’ve been studying and we’ve been going through a lot of different concepts and things in practice, which is helping me get the hang of everything, too. I have a better grip of the defensive scheme so it’s gonna be really exciting this year,” he said.
UConn is counting on Georgia transfer Silas Demary Jr. (a “dawg of a defender,” Ball says) and Dayton transfer Malachi Smith to help the Huskies return to its former status as one of the top defensive teams in the nation, where Hurley’s teams typically fall. It starts at the point of attack with the guards, and continues down to the center spot, where Tarris Reed Jr. – when he’s healthy and not in foul trouble – can be one of the more efficient defensive bigs in the nation.
The Huskies appeared to be on the right track in that area when they beat Boston College in their first exhibition game, even without Demary and Reed. But it remains an area of focus every day.
“Really our focus this year is defense. Defense has been at the pinnacle since we started this summer and even just practices in general, defense has literally been the focus of our practices,” Ball said. “That was our achilles heel last season and we’re just making sure we don’t have to go backwards like that like we did last year.”
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UConn finished last season ranked 75th in the nation in defensive efficiency, which is the worst mark for a Hurley-coached team since he took over the program in 2018-19, according to KenPom. The Huskies were No. 7 defensively in the 2022-23 national championship season, and No. 4 when they went back-to-back in 2023-24.
Based on their offseason acquisitions and some forecasted metrics, the Huskies enter this year ranked 13th in defensive efficiency.
“I think you could see our flaws from when you first saw our team play last year in the nonconference, you could see the areas where we were gonna be exposed throughout the year,” Hurley said. “…A lot of it was around not having the defense and not having the toughness and the will and the rebounding and the junkyard dog mentality, and that identity that my teams have had for a long time that I’d took for granted that we’d had.
“The question for us is, ‘Did we fix the defense?’ If we fixed the defense, then we have as good a chance as anyone to win all the trophies.”
