UConn starts strong, fights back, hangs on at Georgetown

Silas Demary, Jr. (2) fends off Georgetown defense as UConn escapes upset bid with 64-62 win over Hoyas. (Photo by John McDonnell/Associated Press)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — UConn may not be as emphatic or resounding with its wins this season, but its overall resolve has not waned.

Even through a month that has traditionally been unkind to the program under Dan Hurley, this year’s iteration of the Huskies have managed to overcome the best efforts of their opposition despite lackluster performances of their own.

Saturday was no different, as Georgetown welcomed the third-ranked team in the nation to Capital One Arena. But after establishing and losing a double-digit lead, UConn battled back in the second half, regained the initiative and held on for a gritty, 64-62 win over the determined Hoyas.

The win, UConn’s eighth in as many Big East Conference games, furthers the best start to league play since 1998-99, a year that culminated with the first of the program’s six national championships.

“I just think that’s a testament to us just being resilient, and when adversity hits, responding the right way,” point guard Silas Demary, Jr. said of his team’s character. “I think we’ve been in a bunch of games the past couple weeks where we’ve had to fight to work until the end, and I think those games kind of helped prepare us just being ready when a team makes a run like (Georgetown) did, and just being able to respond and still make plays, and not drop our heads.”

“At the end of the day, we got to walk away with the win, and that’s just a blessing,” senior center Tarris Reed, Jr. assessed. “It was a gut check. We walked away with an ugly win, and we’ll take it and we’ll learn from it.”

The Huskies (18-1, 8-0 Big East) staked themselves out to a 13-4 head start in the first four-plus minutes as Reed established his presence in the paint with 11 of UConn’s points out of the gate. However, the visitors were unable to expand their lead beyond 10 points, as a litany of missed shots — UConn missed 14 of 15 field goal attempts to end the first half and start the second — and Demary’s two fouls in the opening stanza took the wind out of the Huskies’ sails.

“He’s had this addiction to it,” Hurley said of Demary’s propensity for finding foul trouble. “He’s gotta go back into fouling rehab. That hurt us in the first half. I thought we were playing really well, he got the fouls, I had to sit him and we lost our rhythm there.”

“Coach is hard on me about not picking up those fouls early,” Demary said, taking accountability for the miscues. “I think the impact I have for the team and what I can do potentially helps us get going. I think I kind of let the team down in the first half. I’ve just gotta be smarter and be more aware of how the refs are calling the game, and just pick and choose my spots when to be aggressive on the defensive end. Coach got into me at halftime, and the guys kind of picked me up. And we were just able to come out there in the second half and just respond.”

The response came after an 11-0 Georgetown run bridging the two halves, a stretch the Hoyas used to take an early second-half advantage before both sides began trading baskets. UConn would storm back with nine straight points to take a 45-40 initiative, a spurt capped by a fortuitous offensive breakdown where a loose ball found its way into the hands of Braylon Mullins, who splashed home an uncontested three that left Ed Cooley defeated when describing what was a microcosm of his team’s season to date.

“We cause a loose ball, we cause a scrum, the ball lands right in their best shooter’s hand with no one around him,” Cooley said. “I’m like, ‘ain’t that some shit?’ Other than that, I thought it was a great Big East game. If they’re the No. 2 team in the country, which they definitely are, 1,000 percent are, they should be No. 1 in the country. They’ve earned it. Their DNA of winning really, really showed tonight.”

Hurley has sometimes bemoaned the lack of a killer instinct among his roster this season, expressing frustration with not being able to string together a complete game. UConn’s practices are notoriously harder than the actual game situations it encounters, something Demary hinted at when he insisted he and his teammates are still searching for the statement win the Huskies have lacked in recent weeks.

“(Hurley) just preaches us playing hard,” he said. “Playing hard is half the battle, I think, especially in the Big East. Everybody, every team, plays as hard as they can, and sometimes I think we lack playing hard the entire game. We’re trying to put together a full 40 minutes of playing hard, and I think that’s why we go so hard in practice. We’ve just gotta continue to keep trying to play hard and put together a full 40.”

Still, Georgetown (9-9, 1-6 Big East) had a chance to tie the game late after Reed, Mullins, Solo Ball and Alex Karaban combined to shoot just 2-of-8 at the free throw line in the final two minutes of regulation. However, KJ Lewis air-balled a straightaway look from beyond the arc, allowing UConn to escape the nation’s capital victorious.

“There’s games like this,” Hurley conceded. “We were able to just kind of gut this out on a night where we’ve got…Braylon Mullins is one of the best shooters in the country, so is Solo Ball, so is Alex Karaban. Obviously, we had a free throw meltdown at the end, and really, what kind of saved us today is we were missing a lot, but we weren’t turning the ball over.”

UConn gets a much-needed bye week to recover before hosting Villanova a week from Saturday in what should be a high-octane showdown in Hartford, featuring the two best freshmen in the Big East, with Mullins squaring off against Wildcat point guard Acaden Lewis. And while Husky fans are inevitably frustrated with yet another game too close for comfort, the seventh win by five points or less this year, Hurley stressed a big-picture look before reiterating the finished product has yet to become reality.

“I don’t think that we should have a fan base, or anyone, nitpicking an 18-1 team,” he cautioned. “Be thrilled that you have a program, a team that’s 18-1, 8-0 in the league and ranked second in the country. Just be happy about that. Don’t nitpick the players. If you want to nitpick the coach, nitpick the coach. The team’s got a lot of growth to get better.”