‘No desire to ever leave here’
Dan Hurley looks ahead to ‘three-peat’ and vows to stay at UConn
HARTFORD — Showered in cheers as he took the Trumbull Street stage late Saturday morning, UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley highlighted his program’s recent past, spoke of its unmatched standing in the sport and laid more ambitious plans for its future.
“Yeah, yeah, let’s hear it, loud as [heck], c’mon,” Hurley said, unable to get through his opening without a curse word to underscore his exhilaration. “Hey, everywhere we went this year …”
A chant of “Hurley! Hurley! Hurley!” broke out and cut him off. An estimated 60,000 fans had gathered near the XL Center for a rally at the end of the Huskies’ national championship parade.
“Yeah, c’mon, let’s go!” Hurley yelled, continuing. “Everywhere we went this year, on the road, MSG,
Brooklyn to Boston to Phoenix, every time we walked into the arena we always said, ‘The champs are here.’ The champs are here today in Hartford with the best fans in the world. Basketball capital of the world: Storrs, Connecticut. Back to back champs. Some of the greatest players to ever wear the UConn uniform are up here, and then next year we go for the threepeat. Let’s go!”
UConn had won its second consecutive national championship five days prior, finishing a dominant run with a 75-60 victory over Purdue in Glendale, Ariz. The ensuing days were chaos, part celebration and part business, the tail end of one historic basketball run and the onramp to another.
In the meantime, there were overtures from Kentucky, which was looking to replace the departed John Calipari. That possibility was a non-starter, a no-chance from the getgo. Hurley, 52, made that clear to Kentucky. And on Saturday he made it clear that he will never coach another college basketball team.
“I had a conversation,” Hurley said inside the XL Center, after the rally. “You talk to your agent the whole year. You talk to him more later in the year. A lot of the conversations, he’s just checking in with you. But he made me
aware of that situation and my family and me and anything that comes forward, it’s like, the only people you should be talking to is UConn. Because we have no desire to ever leave here to coach college basketball anywhere else. Maybe down the road, you hope you can mature enough emotionally to, much later in my career, to try to take a shot at the NBA — down the road, way down the road. I’m not going to coach anywhere else in college, unless UConn doesn’t want me here.”
Hurley was introduced Saturday as a two-time national champion by athletic director David Benedict, the man who hired him and introduced him six years ago, in March 2018. With two Final Four appearances, two national championships (and 2024 Big East regular season and postseason championships), Hurley-UConn is the best thing going in sports. Benedict, Hurley, his agent and other state power players will be designing a new contract for Hurley in the coming weeks and/or months. Hurley signed his most recent deal (six years, $32.1 million) in June 2023 and that can probably soon be lost in the wind like all of Saturday’s blue and white confetti.
The parade zigzagged through downtown and delivered coaches and players to the sea of fans
waiting at the end, with more following along the route. UConn finished 37-3 this season and has won 52 of 57 games since Jan. 31, 2023, when traction was gained and lightspeed was reached by the basketball battering ram that Hurley and his assistants built piece by piece.
Donovan Clingan, the 7-foot-2 center from Bristol, announced on Friday that he will forgo his final two years of eligibility and enter the NBA draft. Freshman guard Stephon Castle (expected to leave) and sophomore guard Alex Karaban (more likely to return to UConn) weren’t ready to make/announce decisions. Plans of reserve senior guard Hassan Diarra, who has one year of eligibility remaining, remain unclear. Guards Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer have exhausted their eligibility. Two freshmen will enter the program, certainly one or two current players will choose to depart for another programs, and transfer portal recruiting is in its 100 MPH spin cycle.
“I’ll let my Twitter speak for it,” Hurley said, referring to a photograph of him laying on the floor of a UConn meeting room, seemingly exasperated. “I thought that was appropriate. It’s chaos. But we’ve been able to navigate a lot of the insanity of it the last couple years and zero in on our type of guys who have the traits that the team is going
to need. We’ve been very strategic. I do think our approach is a little bit different on the visits. There are a lot of characteristics that we’re looking for that we want to make sure that people have for us. Because we’ve got the best product in college basketball right now. As much as we need to recruit people right now, we’re also vetting out what our program wants.”
UConn, which has six national championships in the past 26 seasons, is received differently by recruiting pools — players looking to transfer, high school upperclassmen — than it was, say, 13 months ago. Back to back titles change so much more than highway signage and Wikipedia bios.
“The way that we play basketball, I think people love that,” Hurley said. “The style of offense, the style of defense, the energy and culture, the championships, the players going to the NBA and the way we’re doing it, how the brand is growing and what you’d have a chance to go for next year if you’re a transfer and there’s an opportunity for you to have a role on this team you’re going for UCLAlevel [stuff]. We clearly have all the resources in place and we’ll continue to do that at UConn. We have to make sure it is a twoway street. A lot of schools miss on that. They look at just production and numbers and talent. And you’re not putting together an all-star team. You’re putting together a team
that’s going to be able to function.”
This week has been a whirlwind.
“Why would you sleep when you’re this happy?” Hurley said. “When you get to this level of accomplishment, you barely get enough sleep because you want to be awake more so you can enjoy it more. … Just going back six months [or] to what it took since June, the work that went into it, the treating summer like it was the winter, just the commitment level up the whole organization, through the coaching staff, the players. The realization you come to is that you’re putting together teams and not all-star teams, so as you look at the portal and high school recruiting and you’re own roster it’s like, just continue to put together these type of teams with our type of guys.”
Hurley has made numerous appearances on national TV and radio shows, the reward and responsibility that comes with being the red-inthe-face of an entire sport. News of Calipari leaving Kentucky broke on Sunday, the day before the national championship game. Immediately, speculation was that Kentucky would target Hurley, and Kentucky did. But the way Hurley views it, he has the best job in America and he won’t leave it unless, say, eight years from now, the Knicks call and offer him something he can’t refuse.
Hurley is all in on building
upon what was established in Storrs by Jim Calhoun, added to by Kevin Ollie and now rebuild and refined in the national spotlight by the past few groups of players and staff members. Hurley’s fame has skyrocketed. He was asked if he’ll soon host Saturday Night Live.
“I’d like to,” he said without hesitation. “I think I’d be good up there. They’ve got the curse button or whatever because it’s live, I think, right? I just think college basketball, the men’s side, has done a horrible job marketing, the characters, the coaches, the players. We do a lot of things to hurt ourselves. To take the best sporting event, annually, March Madness, and an incredible sport, we ruin it. We ruin it with G League Ignite. We ruin it with Overtime Elite and having the portal open the first day of the first week of the NCAA Tournament, the day after Selection Sunday. Having no one really in charge of our sport. Playing a national championship game at 9:30 at night on TBS. The best sporting event that our country has on a yearly basis, captures the imagination of everybody, we just do a horrible job of marketing it every year. So I think we all have a role, to take advantage of the marketing of our sport. I’m going to be authentic and myself in all these things.”
The G League Ignite team and Overtime Elite (for which Ollie, now interim coach of the Brooklyn
Nets, was an instrumental figure) are options for high school and prep prospects looking for development and exposure without the college route.
Hurley doesn’t mind playing a role in trying to fix what he deems broken with college basketball. More important, he’s started sharpening his vision for a third consecutive national championship in 2024-25.
“In between parades and the White House trip and all the cool things that come with this, now you just get down to constructing the roster so the team resembles these last couple teams,” he said.
UConn’s two championship teams have been a perfect blend of prospects, transfers, role players and standout players. Hurley and his staff have set the bar, unveiled the model. What if others copy it?
“All right, so if they catch up on us a little bit, we won by a lot,” said Hurley, whose team won six NCAA Tournament games this year by an average of 23.3 points. “I said this last year: We don’t have to be as good next year as we were this year to compete for the biggest championships in the Big East and the NCAAs. We’ve got to bring back a good group from last year’s team, a group that understands. And you supplement that with the freshmen and in the portal. And the way we’re going to work for it is going to be the same as we have the last two years.”