Exciting start
UConn opens the season with swagger
STORRS — UConn didn’t look like a basketball team having to tip-toe into Tuesday night’s season opener wondering if it is any good.
It looked like a team with players who had figured that out last winter and spent the summer shaking in anticipation of showing it.
The Huskies stomped Central Connecticut, 99-48, making this kind of game look the way it should. They were physically superior, of course, but they played with a ferocity to accentuate every obvious advantage, with the swagger of group that’s been places and knows it is going places.
“We didn’t have that March run that UConn is accustomed to,” coach Dan Hurley said, referencing the program’s bounce-back year that ended with a disappointing losses in the Big East Tournament semifinal and NCAA Tournament first round. “But these guys won high-leverage games in the last three or four weeks of the season.”
Tuesday’s was not a high-leverage game. CCSU is a rebuilding mid-major program with 10 new players. This was just UConn’s on-ramp. No season is about where or how the ride begins. It’s about how it ends.
Still, the Huskies sent a message about their potential and their mindset by delighting a near-full Gampel Pavilion, using a pair of 13-0 first-half runs. They wasted no time. They didn’t look uncomfortable. This looked like a team right where it should be, playing in front of fans on campus for the first time since March 2020, right in the faces of the opponent, forcing 29 Central turnovers.
UConn is proud of what it accomplished in the empty gyms of the 2020-21 season — minus the final fiveplus minutes of a loss to Creighton in New York and a loss to Maryland in Indiana the next week. So the sense of unfinished business is the motivator, balanced by recognition for a project that, overall, is trending in the right direction.
Last season wasn’t easy in any way. You don’t succeed in, or emerge from, something like that without having advanced in some way. The hope is that everyone has grown up, that Hurley’s fourth UConn team is his best.
No matter that James Bouknight plays for the Hornets instead of the Huskies.
“The whole theme with the team has been, we should hit the ground run
ning,” Hurley said. “Everyone is a year better, a year more mature as a player, and we expected to hit the ground running,” Hurley said. “We’ve got a lot of guys that, not withstanding the way the last 45:07 went, they believe in themselves and they’re a lot closer. This group is a lot closer and they understand how that chemistry’s got to be.”
UConn had to feel its way through a 102-75 victory over Central to open last season, struggling on defense for the first half. The Huskies put their foot to the Blue Devils’ throat early this time. Tyrese Martin stole and inbound pass and dunked to make it 4-0, kickstarting a performance in which just about every player looked a little quicker, a little stronger, a little more explosive than they were seven months ago.
It was just sharp, all around. No nerves. No intensity lapses. No confusion.
Hurley has raved about Adama Sanogo all offseason and Sanogo played like he was out to support the message, making 9 of 11 shots and scoring 20 points. R.J. Cole made 5 of 6 for 15 points. And Martin twisted and turned his way to the basket for 14 points on 6 of 9. UConn made 19 of its first 24 shots and led 52-23 at the break.
This was kind of old school. Teams at Central’s level got used to coming into Gampel and taking a butt-whipping with its check for $80,000 or $90,000 and going on their way. Those teams have been closer in recent years, though. There were even losses to Wagner and Northeastern in 2016.
UConn passed the eye test Tuesday night, when fans returned to a team transformed. The Huskies are unrecognizable compared to what they were a handful of years ago — and potentially more polished than last season.
It looked like something from another era, one through which Patrick Sellers traveled with a front-row seat before arriving this season to coach CCSU, his alma matter. Sellers was a member of the UConn staff in 20042010.
“The Golden State Warriors have that slogan, ‘Strength in numbers,’ ” Sellers said. “These guys have strength in size. They’re so big. So you walk out with all these big guys and you just feel confident and you feel like you can accomplish anything. I’m sure that gives those guys a lot of confidence and swag, just to walk out with that size and with all those guys returning from last year.”
Central couldn’t slow Sanogo, the anchor to a UConn front line that spent the night on the rim. Last year at this time, Sanogo was just getting used to a new university, a new program, trying to work his way into a rotation during the bizarre limitations of a pandemic.
“Maybe I was able to score a lot today because the other team, I’m not saying it was not that good, but it’s not like they are big men,” Sanogo said. “I think that’s one point. The other point could be, it’s tough to guard me. So, basically, I scored whenever I wanted.”
Said Hurley: “His preparation, what he puts into his success, how badly he wants his program to succeed,” Hurly said. “Just a different type of animal, man. Just a different type of guy with the way he shows up daily.”
Martin and Cole were having to play their first seasons with a new team under those trying circumstances, too.
That’s the three-player core. It’s experienced now. It has entered a new world and on Tuesday night, that core and its supporting cast were all business, all confidence, all swagger. UConn is game into a long journey and beat a team it certainly should. They did it in a way that suggests players know they’re good.
That’s encouraging. UConn got everything out of opening night it wanted and needed, everything it should
“We’re a very talented team and we all know that,” Cole said. “It’s just a matter of us playing to our identity every day and making sure we come out with the necessary toughness, grit.”