UConn closes January on positive note, prepares for February gauntlet

By Connor Wilson (@Conman_815)

HARTFORD, Conn. — The month of January has fared in completely different directions for Dan Hurley and his UConn Huskies over the past two years. 

In 2022-23, after starting 15-1 in the season’s first two months, the team mustered off a 3-6 start to 2023 before finishing 13-1 and eventually hoisting the national championship trophy. The next year featured an historic Huskies squad that went 8-0 in the first month of 2024 en route to the program’s second straight title. Two completely different January journeys, but both ended in the same result in April.

This year’s rendition of January UConn finished somewhere in the middle of that. Not close to the perfect 8-0 last year’s team pulled off, but also nowhere near the complete collapse that 2023 featured. There were highs. There were lows.

The month started out very sour for the Huskies, even in a convincing road victory at Wintrust Arena against DePaul. In the win, star freshman Liam McNeeley twisted his ankle and had to depart. That game against the Blue Demons would end up being the only one he played the entire month of January as he rehabbed from a sprained ankle.

Outside of that win at Wintrust, each of the other seven games in the middle provided its own unique challenges. In a home win over Providence, the Huskies trailed by as many as 14 and needed a ferocious second half comeback to pull off the win. The road loss to Villanova followed with the now-infamous Alex Karaban missed free throws. Then, it looked like both Karaban and the team had turned a corner and put that tough loss behind them when they defeated Georgetown on the road.

“They’re used to dominance,” Hurley said of his team’s adjustment to playing all these close games.

Unfortunately, the rough patch was only starting. One week after the Georgetown win, UConn lost its first home game in nearly two full years when Creighton came to Storrs and defeated the Huskies. A mere three days later, it took overtime to defeat a Butler team who was 1-7 in Big East play after leading by as many as 15 in regulation. Lastly, after narrowly pulling off an overtime win before Christmas, Xavier got the best of the Huskies in round two at the Cintas Center last Saturday to close a 3-3 stretch without McNeeley going into Wednesday.

“If we’re able to get Liam on the court again, when he was on the court, we were playing at a Top 12 level,” Hurley said. “We need him out there.”

The final game, and one to potentially either salvage or ruin the month, was shaping to be the latter. Hosting DePaul, who came into the game 1-9 in Big East play, seemed like an easy test to end the month on a high note. That’s what everyone thought until the Blue Demons jumped out to a double-digit lead in the blink of an eye, and maintained it for most of the first half.

“Credit to DePaul. We get everyone’s best effort. I guess we’ve earned that,” Hurley said. “We get the best version of everyone every time we step on the court.”

Surely that’s not how this movie that is the month of January ends, right? As I said, it wasn’t full 2023 collapse level. UConn outscored DePaul by 19 in the second half on the way to a comfortable looking 72-61 victory. Four Huskies finished in double figures, with Solo Ball and Tarris Reed, Jr. leading the way with 16, while Jaylin Stewart chipped in 15.

“A big part of our turnaround was all the coaches getting on us and continuing to believe in us,” Ball said. 

“Coach was on us hard at halftime, but rightfully so,” Reed added. “We weren’t playing to our capabilities. We knew what we needed to do coming out of the locker room into the second half.”

So, with the win against DePaul, UConn finishes what many considered would be an easy January at 5-3, easy in comparison to the Marquette-St.John’s-Creighton gauntlet to start February. If you were to ask Hurley how he’d assess the past 29 days?

“If we can get consistency from some of our guys and this kid (McNeeley) returns, I think we’ve got a chance to get things rolling again,” he said.

That’s probably the best way to look at it if you’re Hurley, with a glass half-full mentality. From being ranked in the Top 10 to being on the verge of being unranked and falling multiple seed lines in bracketologies in just a couple of weeks, it can be challenging to keep a positive mindset. But you just have to in order to have success or get back to where you were the past two seasons.

As long as Dan Hurley is the man in charge, UConn is never going to go away. They may have less than ideal January stretches from time to time, but as we saw two years ago, the Huskies bounced back.

“While I’m getting crushed by all types of people in the national media, the UConn fans have had my back,” Hurley said. “They’ve been loyal to me, and I’ve returned it right back. That’s why I’ll never coach basketball at another place unless you guys don’t want me here anymore.”

Can this 2025 team pull a 2023 February-type bounceback? We’re about to find out.