All-around game
UConn rides well-balanced attack, pulls away to beat Xavier
NEW YORK — The UConn men’s basketball team has played a lot of Big East Tournament games over the years. Sixty-nine, to be exact.
Never have the Huskies ever shot the ball better than they did on Thursday afternoon. And rarely in the history of the sport has any team shot better than UConn did in the second half.
Leading Xavier by a mere point at halftime, the top-seeded Huskies shot a mesmerizing 78.6 percent from the floor over the final 20 minutes. Donovan Clingan didn’t miss a shot. Neither did Samson Johnson. Alex Karaban and Stephon Castle each missed just one of their combined nine attempts.
Even the bench crew of Solo Ball, Jayden Ross and Apostolos Roumoglou got in on the act, combining to go 4-for-4 from the floor
and help the Huskies hit their final 15 shots of the game.
You read that correctly: topseeded UConn hit its final 15 shots
of the game.
It all added up to an 87-60 rout that propelled UConn (29-3) into the Big East tournament semifinals, where they’ll face St. John’s, a 91-72 winner over Seton Hall.
“This is a playoff game,” head coach Dan Hurley said. “When you’re trying to end a team’s season, period, you’ve got to be absolutely on point. The execution has to be on point. The effort and the intensity and the attention to detail, it’s all got to be there.”
UConn doled out 29 assists, the most for the program in a Big East tourney game, on 35 baskets. The prior record was 27 assists against Syracuse on March 12, 2009 in a game that went six overtimes.
Meanwhile, UConn held Xavier to 28.1% shooting in the second half and 34.4-percent overall, the Musketeers’ lowest ever in a Big East tourney game.
“Our defense, the last 30 minutes, and the 29 assists ... thrilled with the way we responded to some early adversity,” Hurley said.
The first half of the game was
similar to the first time the teams met this season in Cincinnati, an 80-75 UConn win on Jan. 10. The latter half resembled their second meeting in Hartford, when the Huskies pummeled Xaver by 43 points.
It was also hard not to notice the similarities between Thursday’s game and UConn’s 74-60 win at Providence on Saturday night. The Huskies fell behind 15-2 to start that one, but rolled the rest of the way.
Just don’t tell that to Tristen Newton.
“That was a whole different game, whole different team,” Newton said. “(Hurley) warned us that they were going to come out like that and stay with it. We had to start guarding and execute our offense. And we didn’t really think about the last game, we just executed and played defense, rebounded and got out in transition and came back from that.”
Ah yes, Newton. He may not be Big East Player of the Year, but he made a bunch of big plays for UConn in the second half to help UConn pull away.
Newton scored eight of his team-high 13 points on a variety of shots including an impressive two-handed, putback slam of a Cam Spencer missed 3-pointer.
“That dunk opened up my eyes, even though I’ve played with him for the past two years,” Karaban said. “I’ve never seen that before (from Newton).”
Newton disagreed that it was his best dunk at UConn. Sorta.
“In-game, yes,” the 6foot-5 guard said. “But Alex
has see me do some other stuff at practice, so I don’t know why he said that. But at least in-game, that was my best one.”
Newton added a transition layup, a corner 3pointer and a lob to Johnson for a dunk over a nineminute span that turned the Huskies’ 34-33 halftime lead into a 10-point bulge. The Huskies would never trail by less than 10 the rest of the way.
“He’s special,” Karaban said of Newton. “He’s another one that only cares about the team and wants to win rings.”
Newton briefly flirted with his fifth career tripledouble before finishing with 13 points, seven rebounds and five assists to pace UConn’s remarkably well-balanced attack. Clingan scored 11 of his 13 points in the latter half, Karaban, Spencer and Johnson finished with 12 apiece and Castle netted 10.
Quincy Olivari led Xavier (16-17) with 17 points and New Haven’s Desmond Claude added 13 on 5-for-15 shooting.
Xavier scored the game’s first 10 points as UConn looked sloppy and missed its first four shots. The Huskies countered with a 13-0 run of their own, and the lead see-sawed four more times throughout the half. Spencer’s 3-pointer with 10 seconds left put UConn up 34-33, but Dayvion McKnight countered with a tough, fallaway jumper at the buzzer to make it a one-point game at halftime.
The rest of the game (or at least 78.6-percent of it) belonged to the Huskies.
Rim rattlings
Chris Smith, UConn’s all-time leading scorer via Bridgeport, was recognized before the Garden crowd during a timeout as a Big East Legend.