Alex Karaban steps up big in March (again), but you shouldn’t be surprised

Alex Karaban has broken out of slump at best possible time for UConn, who now stands two wins from defending Big East championship. (Photo by UConn Men’s Basketball)

By Connor Wilson (@Conman_815)

NEW YORK — It was just two months ago that Alex Karaban had arguably the worst moment of his illustrious UConn career.

At the free throw line inside Finneran Pavilion, with seconds remaining and the Huskies down by one, the redshirt junior clanked both free throws in what quickly turned into the team’s first Big East loss of the year.

For the following six weeks or so, Karaban was in a deep slump shooting the basketball. From that first Villanova game through—ironically—the second time the Huskies faced the Wildcats in Hartford in February, the typically automatic wing shot 10-of-53 from behind the arc, good for 19 percent when rounded up. Something was clearly off.

“Personally, I was going through a lot that

month where I wasn’t shooting it well and wasn’t playing at the level I needed to,” Karaban said after a win last week over Marquette, aware of his untimely struggles.

Since then, starting with the Huskies’ latest loss at the hand of St. John’s at Madison Square Garden, Karaban has shot 16-for-32 from three, an even 50 percent. What changed for the Connecticut star, who scored a team-high 18 points and connected on 4-of-6 triples in Thursday’s Big East tournament quarterfinal win over the same Villanova Wildcats team that his slump began against?

“We're desperate for championships here, so we want to play our best basketball right now,” he said. “We've stacked up five wins in a row now. We want to keep going.”

Karaban sparked a second-half comeback for the Huskies, who after being tied at 51, closed the game on a 22-5 run to set up a date with Creighton on Friday night. He scored 15 of his 18 points after the intermission and hit some dagger threes, shots he just wasn’t hitting at this time last month.

“I felt like I had to be more aggressive coming out of halftime,” Karaban said. “Just be the player that my team needs me to be and rely on my confidence.”

The player his team needs him to be is the version of Alex Karaban that was so crucial during UConn’s postseason dominance over the past two seasons. A winning player making winning plays, such as Thursday, when he grabbed nine rebounds and dished out six assists in addition to leading the team in scoring. That late run by the Huskies looked eerily similar to one of countless stretches we saw from the 2024 squad.

“You definitely had flashbacks of last year when we go on the big runs,” Karaban said. “It was more so just trying to go possession by possession, break them down slowly. I thought we did a good job of that heading into the under-8 media timeout.”

If UConn is going to continue to have those flashbacks of last year’s dominance, it’s going to need Karaban to continue playing like he’s played the past two weeks. There may not be as much firepower coming out of Storrs as the past two seasons, but the experience that players like Karaban have is unmatched by anyone else in the country.

The Huskies are back in action Friday when they take on Creighton in the semifinals, looking to get back to the Big East tournament championship game for a second straight year.