NEW YORK – The stage was perfectly set.
Madison Square Garden, aka Storrs South. Nineteen thousand raucous fans, some of them still donning Santa suits from a day of bar-hopping at New York City’s SantaCon. A matchup with one of the top teams in college basketball. A golden opportunity to make a statement. All UConn had to do was rise to the occasion — and it absolutely did.
Twenty-four hours after Hoops HQ’s Jamal Murphy begged the question “Is UConn back?”, we got a decisive answer at the Hall of Fame Series. The Huskies upset No. 8 Gonzaga, 77-71, in a thrilling back-and-forth affair, improving to 8-3 on the season. Yes, UConn is back. Keep the SantaCon parties rolling!
“Obviously thrilled to win, really gutted it out,” head coach Dan Hurley said afterwards. “Third straight game versus a really good team. That’s as good a team as we’ll play the whole year… Thrilled, obviously, to be back stateside and playing games back here on the mainland.”
Hurley was, of course, alluding to the team’s disappointing trip to Hawaii for the Maui Invitational in late November. After suffering three straight losses to then-unranked opponents (Memphis, Colorado and Dayton), UConn dropped from No. 2 to No. 25 in the AP poll and was subsequently written off by many. The program’s fall from grace seemed perfectly encapsulated by the image of Hurley losing his mind on the sidelines in the OT loss to Memphis.
How quickly things change. During the second half of Saturday’s game, Hurley stopped himself from demonstrably arguing a call, instead breaking into a big smile and putting his arm around the referee.
“The thing with the officials, it was a great thing to go through, very valuable for me,” Hurley said. “Every year or 18 months, I have an episode with the referees. About January, before we won the ’23 championship, was probably the last episode I had. It’s not a nightly thing. You saw me hugging those guys and smiling. For the most part, I’ve grown a lot that way. Part of it was just 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. Not all of it.”
“Some of the criticism I took, I deserved. Not all of it.”
— UConn coach Dan Hurley
The joy has since been restored to Hurley and this team. Since returning from Maui, the Huskies have won four straight games over Maryland Eastern Shore, Baylor, Texas and Gonzaga. The turnaround has done more than just dispel the notion that UConn can’t contend for a three-peat — it has shown the character and resilience of this group. “When we were going through the Maui experience and then returned home, the narratives and the external noise, people not of our character and caliber might have really gone into a pretty big slide,” Hurley said. “We could have found ourselves under .500 going into league play very easily with this stretch of games.”
“We felt the backlash,” said junior forward Alex Karaban, who scored a key bucket down the stretch in the win over Gonzaga. “Everyone kind of just gave up on us after what we did in Maui. The only response we had to do was prove to everyone the type of team that we are.”
That’s exactly what the Huskies did on Saturday, grinding out a win in what was an extremely physical, tightly-contested game. The Garden was rocking, too, adding more intensity and drama to the action. “Listen, UConn just has the heart of a champion,” Gonzaga head coach Mark Few said afterwards. “Danny kind of brings that out of them. We knew it was going to be a physical fist fight.”
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“He’s hungrier than ever”The toughness — both mental and physical — of the Huskies was on full display. Gonzaga entered the game averaging 90.3 points per game (third in Division I) but scored just 71 points on 44 percent shooting. After 6-foot-10 senior forward Samson Johnson got injured on a scary fall early in the first half, the Huskies had to play most of the game without their starting center. Still, they managed to win the rebound battle, 35-34, and hold Gonzaga’s leading scorer, 6-foot-9 senior forward Graham Ike, to just three points in 12 minutes.
UConn was able to prevail on a night when Johnson went down, Karaban and senior point guard Hassan Diarra combined to shoot 0 for 11 from three and two other key players, Solo Ball and Tarris Reed Jr., dealt with foul trouble. The main reasons? Defense and Liam McNeeley. The 6-foot-7 freshman guard dropped a game-high 26 points to go along with eight rebounds and four assists. On multiple occasions, he waved his arms emphatically to fire up the Garden crowd, which was — as usual — comprised mostly of UConn faithful.
“I heard a lot about it just from the success of last year’s team,” McNeeley said about playing at MSG. “I just wanted to carry that forward and keep that momentum up in this place. I never played in The Mecca before, but it was a great first experience.”
Gonzaga hung tough, thanks in large part to the red-hot shooting of 6-foot-5 senior guard Khalif Battle (21 points), a transfer from Arkansas, and the all-around play of 6-foot senior point guard Ryan Nembhard (16 points, seven assists, four rebounds), but the Huskies sent their many loyal fans home happy. As they exited the Garden into the chilly New York night, murmurs could be heard among the crowd: “We’re back. We’re so back.”
With conference play beginning this week, UConn has fully regained its mojo. “Just thinking about what we were about to do, to show our character and champions will coming out of the MTE, I think we got momentum,” Hurley said. “We’re in a good place in terms of our confidence and our belief that we could be where we want to be with this team.”
