Agony turns into ecstasy

Huskies secure key win after brutal stretch

The UConn men played 15 minutes of just about the worst offensive basketball one could ever imagine.

After jumping out to a 10-0 lead, they took ridiculous shots, missed when they did take the right shot and turned the ball over again andagain, going scoreless for nearly five minutes at one point, and more than seven minutes during another stretch. It was eye-bleed bad, that first half at Georgetown on Tuesday night, and it set off the predictable reaction on social media.

But a basketball game is 40 minutes, not 15, and the agony was bound to end. When it did, the Huskies, who had kept themselves in the gamewithhustle and defense, ran to the finish like an old muscle car after an overdue tuneup, beating Georgetown70-57.

“Wejuststayed together andwe

agreement on what I think it should look like. And it’s really helped.”

UConn doesn’t suddenly look like DePaul or Arkansas, who really like to turn things into a track meet, and Auriemma has specified that he doesn’t want his team to play so fast that it becomes detrimental.

Per Her Hoop Stats, UConn is 112th in the country in pace, averaging 72.5 possessions per 40 minutes, while DePaul cracks the 80s (81.8) and Arkansas sits at 77.2. But UConn’s pace so far this season is its second highest since the 2015-16 season, per Her Hoop Stats, with the lowest in that time frame (70.6) coming in 201617.

Still Auriemma said the more this team can get out and run, the better.

“Anytime you’ve got to play half-court, you’ve got to walk the ball up the floor, run your half-court offense the whole time against the team that’s sitting there waiting for you, man, that’s a slog,” Auriemma said. “No slight to any dentist out there but man, that’s like sitting in a dentist’s chair. It’s awful. So we’re trying to avoid that as much as we can.”

In UConn’s last few games alone, the reinforcement of that lesson was evident. After a sluggish game at Georgetown, UConn looked great in transition the last two, scoring 17 and 28 fastbreak points against St. John’s and Xavier.

“I will be the first to say that it started off in practice,” junior guard Christyn Williams said.

“Coach has been making us do all these transition drills. We’ve been running a lot. We sometimes get ourselves in trouble because we go way too fast and we turn the ball over, but I feel like the past couple games, we’ve gotten into our groove — not going too fast, but not going too slow.”

Against better defenses, UConn may not be able to get away with scor

ing 20 fast-break points (it managed six against Tennessee and 10 against South Carolina, for example). At the same time, the Huskies’ rapidly improving defense gives them a greater opportunity to control the pace.

“I think we definitely do thrive off of that,” Nelson- Ododa s a i d. “We’re getting better at it but it’s definitely not at the level that wewant it to be and that [Auriemma] wants it to be. I think we’re capable of doing more and I think our transition game will definitely help us going into the tournament [by making] other teams run and keep up with us, and also just get easier buckets, too.”

Road trip woes

UConn’s meeting at Creighton (and its next stop in Indianapolis to take on Butler) mark its final road trips of the season, aside from traveling to play the entire NCAA Tournament in San Antonio.

The Huskies’ day-today lives have changed so much with all the COVID19 protocols and restrictions they face, and so too has the way they’ve gone about road trips.

“It’s nothing like it used to be. They’re missing out on a lot,” Auriemma said. “The game at Georgetown was the first time I took the team out to dinner all year long. And that would have never happened in the past. We’re very careful where we go. We’re in a private dining room, everybody’s taking all the precautions, everybody’s masked up, the social distancing part and all that. We can’t do a lot of the things that we really, really enjoy doing that make the travel a lot more bearable.

“The bubble at Mohegan is going to be even worse. And then the NCAA Tournament is gonna be worse. You don’t have much to look forward to other than the actual games.”