Hurley adamant to prove UConn is back among national elite as Huskies raise expectations

Dan Hurley defends UConn’s second-place preseason pick by highlighting Huskies’ upside and experience as program moves closer to heights it has become renowned for. (Photo by Bob Dea/Daly Dose Of Hoops)

NEW YORK — Speaking with the hardwood of Madison Square Garden as a backdrop to countless Connecticut basketball memories over the past three decades as the home of the New York Knicks became a de facto second home court for the Huskies on their path from regional darling to national powerhouse, Dan Hurley calmly and bluntly laid out the mindset with which his program expects to operate as he enters his fourth season at the helm in Storrs and second in a reconfigured Big East Conference that is eager to embrace the renaissance of one of its most iconic properties.

Picked second in the league’s preseason poll behind perennial favorite Villanova, Hurley was equal parts realistic and bold at last week’s Big East media day, drawing a line in the sand for the standards he has set for a team in search of an identity befitting both sides of the basketball.

“Was it Ricky Bobby (who said), ‘if you’re not first, you’re last?’” Hurley asked a horde of media gathered to hear his take on UConn and its prospects entering the coming year, one in which the Huskies must replace James Bouknight after the virtuoso guard was drafted by the Charlotte Hornets last summer. “Obviously you want to, in your mind as a coach, keep advancing the program. Last year, we were clearly — over the course of the entire season — the third-best team in the league behind Villanova and Creighton in terms of overall quality the whole season. We want to be better this year than we were last year, so the next logical step for us is to put ourselves in a position during the regular season, to late in the year, be in contention for a championship.”

“I feel like we have a very, very deep team. That’s a tremendous challenge with where Villanova is as a program with their culture and their mentality. They don’t give many games away, they make very, very few mistakes. And hopefully for us with such an older team, we’ll be a team that makes less mistakes and blinks less, especially at the end of games, and is able to be in contention at the end of March.”

Bouknight may be gone, but the core of last season’s roster — which fell to Maryland in the NCAA Tournament — remains. Hurley is confident that RJ Cole, Tyrese Martin and Isaiah Whaley will all take the next steps into potential all-conference players, with Adama Sanogo already on that trajectory up front and a supporting cast that includes Akok Akok, Jalen Gaffney, Andre Jackson, Tyler Polley, and a highly-touted freshman class comprising one of the deepest units from top to bottom in not just the Big East, but also the nation.

“From an offensive standpoint, losing a guy like James forces you to really look at your ball movement, your pace of play, some of the things you flow into in transition,” Hurley assessed of UConn’s offensive makeup in Bouknight’s absence. “I think for us, our path forward with this group is pretty simple: We’re going to be an inside-out team. We believe that Adama Sanogo is going to be one of the best big guys in the country this year and one of the best players in this league, we feel like RJ Cole has the potential to be a much more dynamic player this year as we give him the green light to be more assertive and look for his offense a lot more. We’re obviously going to need more from Tyrese Martin as that third scorer, and then we’ve got a collection of six or seven guys that could get us 15 on any given night, so I think you’re going to see a more cohesive offensive team.”

As for the in-your-face pressure defense that has become a trademark of every Hurley-coached team, providing a live, real-time stamp of its leader’s image? That will only ramp up in lockstep, the coach declared.

“We’re going to play elite-level defense,” Hurley proclaimed. “Elite defense, elite-level rebounding, elite ‘I’m going to play harder than my opponent and show up with more desperation and more physicality,’ will put you in a position to win every time you step on the floor. If we get a little bit better offensively than we were last year, we’ve got a chance to be a better team than we were last year. Our depth is unique and our stature is impressive. We’re an impressive-looking team, athletically and physically.”

“We’re way ahead of where we’ve been. We’re way more organized, we’re so much further ahead in terms of what we have in, and that’s the benefit of having eight returning guys who have real experience with you. I think that teams like us, older teams, are going to play better basketball — cleaner basketball — earlier in the season.”

Hurley is banking on said experience to propel UConn closer to Villanova and the stratosphere the Wildcat program has propelled itself to, and has already made significant strides to close the gap between the two. His famous “you better get us now” comment after a loss to Villanova in January 2020 has only been backed up in droves through multiple wins on the recruiting trail, an improved product on the floor, and of course, the unbridled intensity and competitive desire that has been ubiquitous since his youth in Jersey City, and has never left his side years later.

“There was nowhere to go but up from when we saw them here in year one,” Hurley said of the comparison to Villanova and the motivation it triggered. “It really ruined Christmas and was a real wake-up call as to how far away we were at that time. We feel like we’re much better positioned, short-term and long-term, to go into every season in our minds believing we could compete for a championship in this league and that we’re potentially national championship contenders, too, the type of team that could make a run in the NCAA Tournament. When you’re the head coach of UConn, that’s where you need to be.”