UConn men roll in finale
Huskies rout Georgetown, take momentum into Big East Tournament.
STORRS — There is a storm bearing down on New York City. There won’t be snow, or dangerous lightning or destructive winds associated with it. There’s no danger to property or power lines, but necessary precautions should be taken against bruised feelings and battered egos.
It has been a decade since the city’s forecast has had a March storm from the Northeast as torrential as this one. The UConn men’s basketball team is moving with high velocity toward Madison Square Garden, poised not just to rejoin old rivals at the Big East Tournament, but to reclaim it.
Missing this renaissance will be the Huskies’ fans jamming MetroNorth and taking over the bars around Herald Square. The Big East will be allowing only a handful of friends and family in, and the bistros are not fully open, some of the best ones, sadly, closed for good by the pandemic that has taken so much from us.
But the way these edgy Huskies
dismantled Georgetown, 98-82, on national TV in the regular-season finale Saturday is fair warning. They mean to upend this Big East Tournament, the way UConn used to, seven times between 1990 and 2011, and take it with them to Indianapolis.
“This year, we know it’s the year,” James Bouknight said, “we’re just so confident. In practice, we just talk about it. We know we have a special team and we could actually make something happen this year. We could make some noise and be back to being that name-brand school, that bleed-blue school.”
To be clear, this was not a vintage, but hardly a bad Hoyas team the Huskies blew out from the tip. Georgetown had won four of five coming in, with a lineup laced with seniors and grad students. Ten days earlier, UConn had to sweat out a win in D.C.
The storm has been gathering since Feb. 23, when UConn outscored Georgetown 30-16 to finish that game. A few days later, the Huskies made short work of a Marquette team that was coming off an impressive win at North Carolina. They went to New Jersey last Wednesday and beat Seton Hall in a game where everything seemed on the line.
And now they have finished off the regular season, such as it was, with a 14-6 record, 11-6 in the
Big East and 10-2 in the games Bouknight was healthy enough to play, 5-1 since he returned.
They’ll be the No. 3 seed in the tournament, but they are the hottest team going in — healthy and deep and functioning at full capacity. “Clicking on all cylinders,” as Jalen Gaffney said.
They lost at Villanova, the champs, on Feb. 20, but Bouknight was still getting his game legs back. The Wildcats have since lost their best player, Collin Gillespie, to a season-ending knee injury. UConn lost twice to No. 2 Creighton, but one game could have been won with a free throw, the other had no Bouknight, and Creighton has its own issues to resolve.
So when the Huskies take the court against either No. 11 DePaul, or whoever gets the No. 6 seed, in the quarterfinals on Thursday, they will be the ‘it’ team, if not the team to beat. All this would be exhilarating under any circumstances, but in their first season in the Big East? After those dreary years as also-rans in The American?
“We’ve got to have good preparation,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said, “and not drink the Kool-Aid, because now we’ve gone from,
‘Is this team a bubble team?’ to now, all of a sudden, ‘Final Four
sleeper.’ So just don’t drink the Kool-Aid. People haven’t praised a lot of our season, we’ve had a lot of detractors, and I love that. We have a chip on our shoulder, a real edge to us.”
Hurley, after his 200th career win, sounding as pugnacious as a young Jim Calhoun, has delivered the goods, so he gets to play the everyone-doubted-us card, even if not that many did after Bouknight returned. It’s a good time to scrub your social media accounts; he’s talking about digging up old posts. “All of a sudden we’re a sexy pick to make a big run here in March,” Hurley said, “where no one thought we were any good not too long ago.”
Not long ago, the random national TV game for the AAC’s UConn was filled with long, sad soliloquy, the announcers wondering what had happened to the program? Where had the firepower of Calhoun’s Huskies gone? Now the national conversation is about just how far UConn can ride this wave, how good Bouknight is, how much better things are bound to get in the coming years.
One year ago Friday, UConn said goodbye to its last group of seniors, effectively said goodbye to the American era with a win over Houston, and Hurley left the court slapping fans hands, setting the stage for the excitement
that was to be in 2020-21. The pandemic dampened, but hasn’t stalled the storm that was already brewing.
“I think we have even more confidence going into the tournament,” Tyler Polley said, who was honored with the current seniors. “We’re just clicking right now, playing real good basketball. We’re just going to play as hard as we can and make the most out of March.”