GLENDALE, Ariz. — The lovable maniac who rebuilt UConn into a juggernaut refused to allow his team to relax.
Dan Hurley exhorted the Huskies to keep pushing for more even though their place in history was already cemented
He screamed for more defensive pressure after an Alex Karaban corner 3-pointer put UConn up 14. He got down in a defensive stance and bellowed “Get a stop!” after a Cam Spencer bucket extended the lead to 18. When his defense dared to allow Purdue to score, Hurley shouted “Don’t let up! Don’t let up!”
UConn never let up, not during its 75-60 takedown of Zach Edey and Purdue in Monday’s NCAA championship game, not at any point during a dominant title defense. The Huskies answered their head coach’s call for precision and ruthlessness, breaking every opponent they faced en route to a second straight championship and the program’s sixth since 1999.
Only a year ago, the UConn team led by Jordan Hawkins and Adama Sanogo trounced its six NCAA tournament opponents by 20 points per game. The team that was supposed to be the team after the team proved to be even more inevitable, winning six NCAA tournament games by a record-setting 23.3 points apiece.
Since the demise of John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty almost five decades ago, the only programs to repeat before UConn were Florida in 2006 and 2007 and Duke in 1991 and 1992. All five Florida starters bypassed the NBA Draft to return to chase a second championship. Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill were among the four Duke starters who did the same.
What UConn has accomplished this season is a different and even more audacious feat. Hurley didn’t have the luxury of bringing his team back intact in a quest for a repeat. Five of last season’s top eight players moved on after the Huskies ripped through the NCAA tournament with startling ease, winning six games by at least 13 points apiece.
When Hurley was asked if he had engineered the greatest two-year run in modern men’s college basketball history, he first would only admit that it’s “up there.”
“I can’t say anything about Duke because I’m going to piss my brother off,” he said with a smile. “I guess I can say stuff about Florida. But I love Billy Donovan. So I’m in a bad spot.”
Moments later, Hurley finally admitted the obvious.
Said Hurley, “It’s the best two-year run, I think, in a very, very long time.”
Step 1: Stay hungry
UConn’s path to college basketball’s first repeat championship in 17 years began last April almost as soon as the confetti got swept up.
Once the celebrations began to slow and the departing players began NBA Draft preparations, Hurley and his staff examined who was left. They made plans to build around UConn’s three returning standouts: floor-spacing four man Alex Karaban, playmaking point guard Tristen Newton and defensive buzzsaw Donovan Clingan.
Hurley earmarked one remaining starting spot for incoming freshman wing Stephon Castle, the rare McDonald’s All-American whose unselfishness and team-first mentality stood out as much as his talent. The UConn staff filled the other vacant starting spot via the portal, landing sought-after Rutgers sharpshooter Cam Spencer, a kindred spirit to Hurley, the rare player as passionate and driven as he is.
The result was a roster that featured a perfect mix of NCAA tournament-hardened veterans and hungry newcomers. As Hurley said recently, “As soon as we saw how good Cam was and Steph, I think we knew we had a starting five that was going to be as good as what anyone had in the sport.”
What kept Hurley up at night during the offseason wasn’t whether UConn was talented enough. To him the enemy was complacency. He read books on leadership and peppered coaching colleagues with questions about how to help his players remaining maniacal about winning the year after ascending to college basketball’s mountaintop.
Returning players who had already experienced Hurley’s legendarily grueling practices and workouts assumed they had an idea of what was coming. Then, says Karaban with a smile, Hurley “turned it up to another level.”
On the sideline at UConn practices were a set of cardboard posters representing every trophy that the Huskies could win during the upcoming season. Those posters took a beating from Hurley kicking them down or firing projectiles at them whenever he felt his team didn’t practice up to its capabilities.
“He was being extra intense,” Karaban said. “He really gave us a warning on how he was going to approach the season. If you were satisfied with what we did last year, he wasn’t going to tolerate that.”
In October, UConn left campus to play a closed-door scrimmage against a Virginia team unranked in the AP preseason top 25. The first half was an early glimpse of the Huskies at the top of their game. The reigning champs outscored Tony Bennett’s team by 10-plus points.
The second half was a different story. Virginia, in Hurley’s words, “smashed” a UConn team that was feeling a little too satisfied with itself, outscoring the Huskies so convincingly that it left Hurley wondering if his team was actually any good.
In a film session the next day, Hurley tore into his returning players for their lack of leadership. The way Karaban remembers it, “he ripped me. He ripped Tristen. He told us that we’ve got to do way better if we wanted to have some success this year. Not even all the success we wanted, just some success.”
Message delivered. Loud and clear.
Step 2: Run it back
UConn stormed to the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament, dropping only three games along the way and steamrolling everyone else. One loss came against Seton Hall when Clingan only played 14 minutes due to injury. The other two came when Kansas and Creighton shot the lights out from 3-point range.
When fans and media were heaping praise on UConn, Hurley would keep his players sharp by reminding them that wasn’t always the case. He constantly brought up that the Huskies were projected third in the Big East preseason poll and had five teams picked ahead of them in the AP preseason Top 25.
“For a lot of the year we’ve used the external slights, the perceived slights, all those things, the world’s against us mentality,” Hurley said. “I think that gets you through the regular season, the Big East grind.”
It all paved the way for Monday’s title game, the rare winner-take-all matchup between college basketball’s two best teams. It was UConn versus Purdue, Hurley versus Matt Painter, Clingan versus Zach Edey.
The intriguing matchup swung in UConn’s favor in part because of the defensive strategy that Hurley devised. Hell-bent on not allowing Edey’s supporting cast to beat the Huskies from behind the arc, Hurley had Clingan defend the 7-foot-4 Purdue giant by himself as best he could and instructed his perimeter players to erase the Boilermakers’ 3-point shooters.
Edey had a heroic 37 and 10, but it wasn’t nearly enough. Purdue didn’t even attempt its third 3-pointer until a full-court heave at the halftime buzzer. The nation’s No. 2 3-point shooting team finished 1 of 7 from behind the arc, the fewest attempts by any team in the national title game since 1995 UCLA.
“Coming into the game we really felt like if we were able to take the other guys out of the game and really guard the 3-point line, we were willing to concede 25 or 27 from Edey,” UConn assistant coach Luke Murray said. “Their offensive efficiency goes off the charts when those other guys step up and make shots, so that was our game plan.”
Or as Newton put it, “Edey only shoots twos. He doesn’t shoot threes. If he makes 15 twos like he did today, that’s 30. Where are the rest of the points going to come from?”
Without more support for Edey, Purdue never could catch up. UConn led by six at halftime, by double figures five minutes into the second half and by as many as 18. Newton led the Huskies with 20 points to earn the Final Four’s most outstanding player award. Castle, Spencer and Clingan joined Newton on the five-member all-NCAA tournament team.
It wasn’t until the final minute that Hurley at last relaxed, that he stopped pleading with the referees for phantom foul calls and begging his players for more defensive intensity. When Hurley sent in UConn’s benchwarmers, he chest-bumped Murray, gestured to the UConn crowd for more noise and hugged each of his starters one-by-one as they came off the floor.
An hour later, during his postgame news conference, Hurley was already looking ahead.
“I mean, s***,” he said, “we’re going to try to replicate it again. We’re going to maintain a championship culture. We’re bringing in some very talented high school freshmen. Our returning players, through player development, will take a big jump. We’ll strategically add through the portal. I don’t think that we’re going anywhere.”
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