Hurley, UConn youth growing together leading into Big East opener

Alex Karaban exhorts Madison Square Garden crowd as UConn won fourth straight Saturday to erase aftertaste of winless Maui trip. (Photo by Position Sports)

NEW YORK — After his UConn team continued exorcising its Maui Invitational demons last Sunday, Dan Hurley had a proposition.

“Maybe,” the Huskies’ head coach postulated, “the people with the shovels and the dirt, maybe they were too quick to grab the shovel and throw the dirt on us. Maybe. We’ll see.”

Hurley shared his sentiment after UConn followed its statement win over Baylor with an equally resonant road victory against Texas four days later. And after Saturday’s resilient dispatch of a Top 10 program in Gonzaga, on a de facto home court at Madison Square Garden, the only shovels and dirt being thrown around these days are to bury a Hawaii excursion that now looks more like an aberration than a Waterloo of sorts.

“Listen, Maui was a very complex trip,” Hurley recalled. “There were a lot of things going on, and the three games felt like one long game. It was a total blender we were in out there. When you’re in a tournament like that, it’s hard to separate and evaluate, and for us, the level of success we’re having as a program, to go out there and lose that first game—that thing with the officials—I think it was just a great thing to go through, very valuable for me. Part of it was I coached the guys mad out there in Maui, mad that they weren’t playing the caliber of basketball that I wanted them to play, and I think I learned a lot from that experience. Some of the criticism I took, I deserved.”

Moreover, Hurley appears to have made believers out of his players again, a quality that has been UConn’s biggest intangible during the Huskies’ latest dominant run atop the sport’s summit.

“Even just as players, we felt the backlash of just (how) everyone kind of gave up on us after what we did in Maui,” Alex Karaban revealed. “The only response we had was to prove to everyone the type of team we were. We got these three games, which we needed badly, but at the same time, we know we start Big East play and Big East play is no joke. I’m glad we proved to everybody who we are, but we have so much more work and so much improving that we can do as a team.”

Throughout non-conference play, Hurley has harped on the development of his freshmen and sophomores, a trait that was on full display Saturday as Liam McNeeley dazzled with a career-high 26 points while Jaylin Stewart tallied several clutch baskets in the second half, including the first five points of the 10-0 run that flipped the script permanently into the Huskies’ hands.

“They showed tonight that we probably made the right decision to take some lumps early,” Hurley said of his younger core. “The upside of Jaylin Stewart, Jayden Ross and Solo Ball, I think, gives us a chance to improve a lot more throughout the course of the year than maybe, a lot of teams that are really old right now, maybe don’t have the upside that we have once our guys really grow up.”

McNeeley, who had never played at the Garden prior to Saturday, added his name into the annals of UConn legends who have had baptisms at the World’s Most Famous Arena, and according to his teammates and coaches, that performance was merely a small piece of what is to come.

“It means everything just for him to have that confidence, have that swagger and really propel us to a win,” Karaban said of McNeeley. “To do it as a freshman, too, it’s unbelievable. He’s just continuing to prove himself. That’s who he is as a player, and his hard work’s truly paying off.”

“I just think we’re still trying to figure out and build different ways that we can get him advantages,” Hurley echoed. “I don’t think he’s even starting to shoot the ball anywhere near the level that he’s gonna shoot the ball at, but you could see just us getting him involved in more zooms and more grenades, and more movement where he can get his shoulders downhill at the rim. And at 6-foot-7, he’s gonna get adept at throwing those lobs to our centers. He can see the 3-point line, he can finish at the rim and he can get to the foul line, so I think to mitigate the losses of (Tristen Newton) and Steph Castle and Cam Spencer, it’s like, he’s got so much pressure on him as a freshman in this program. I thought his game against Texas was incredibly mature. He’s playing winning basketball, smart, tough basketball. His performance (Saturday) should shoot him to the top of any of these lists I see of the best freshmen in the country. He’s doing it at both ends. He’s doing it on the backboard, he’s not volume scoring, and there’s so much pressure on him because he’s our second-best player next to Alex.”

And as UConn grows as a team, its leader does too as a coach. Hurley has always been vocal about needing to consistently evolve, almost as much as the pressure he puts on himself to succeed, which sometimes borders on insanity. On Saturday, the coach worked official Tommy Morrissey after a call, then put his arm around him in a moment that not only went viral, but showcased his ever-present metamorphosis.

“Every year, 18 months, I have an episode with the referees,” he admitted. “It’s not a nightly thing. You saw me hugging those guys and smiling, and for the most part, I’ve grown a lot that way.”

And after a disastrous Thanksgiving week, UConn appears to have grown as well, moving closer to the product Hurley expected it to be even if it is still far from last year’s juggernaut.

“For us, we were able to save our non-conference,” he said. “We were able to do that with the Baylor win and this, and winning at Texas was really good. Just thinking about what we were able to do, and show our character in a champion’s will coming out of the MTE, I think we’re in a good place in terms of our confidence and our belief that we can be where we want to be with this team.”