Hurley updates Castle’s injury status
STORRS — The Uconn men’s basketball team will be without its starting point guard for at least a few weeks, head coach Dan Hurley said Friday.
Stephon Castle, who slipped on the XL Center court in the second half of the Nov. 11 game against Stonehill, suffered a right knee injury that required a “minor procedure,” according to Hurley.
“He’s looking anywhere from early December to after that, it’s like a two-, three-, four-week thing. It was a very minor procedure and it was best case scenario for him. He looks better already today,” Hurley said. “And great athletes tend to recover better and quicker.”
Hurley clarified that the procedure was “to get a little bit of clean-up,” and that Castle “didn’t tear anything.”
The Mcdonald’s High School All-american and Big East Preseason Freshman of the Year, a projected lottery pick entering the season, averaged 14.5 points, 6.5 rebounds, 3.5 assists and two steals through the Huskies first two games. He was a relatively late scratch for Tuesday’s game against Mississippi Valley State, as the team continued to gather information.
Castle will miss this weekend’s Empire Classic games against Indiana on Sunday and either No. 19 Texas or Louisville on Monday at Madison Square Garden. The Huskies then have two buy games before the much-anticipated trip to No. 1 Kansas on Dec. 1 and a return to the Garden for No. 20 North Carolina on Dec. 5.
Freshman classmate Solo Ball stepped into Castle’s starting role on Tuesday and finished with 10 points, three rebounds and an assist while shooting 3 for 12 from the field.
“It’s a chance for some of the more talented freshmen to get more of a chance, it’s a chance for Hassan (Diarra) to show his value even more,” Hurley said. “Everyone moves up a spot. It’s never good to lose a player of his caliber, but we went through something like this early last year and it did help – it hurt to go through but it did help.”
The Huskies began last season without Andre Jackson Jr. after he broke his pinky finger in an offseason practice, and then lost both Jordan Hawkins (concussion) and Samson Johnson (foot) in last year’s season-opener, ironically also against Stonehill at the XL Center.
“Do people hold grudges any more?” he said. “Do people remember stuff like that? Today, it’s like something happens and you just move on, but sometimes you’re surprised things do stick. And I think that stuck. Connecticut’s Connecticut, and people love celebrating beating Connecticut.”
The Huskies had just stopped reeling from their loss at NC State on Sunday. Then they learned Azzi Fudd had injured her knee and would not be playing.
The Huskies put all this emotional baggage in a blender and it poured out in the form of 16 steals, and a 20-2 run with Bueckers and the freshman in the second quarter — an old-school Uconn knockout punch — and, ultimately, an 80-48 win over Maryland before 10,299 at sold-out Gampel Pavilion.
“Just seeing them celebrate (last year), it gave us fuel to go out there and be aggressive and throw the first punch,” said Aubrey Griffin, who had 13 rebounds. “That really fueled us for this game. … If we can come with this same energy every day, it’s going to become a habit.”
Losing gets old fast, especially for organizations that aren’t used to it. Uconn played angry, like a team that was tired of losing, tired of trying to explain losses.
“I did a bad job leading last weekend,” Bueckers said, “in terms of the intensity we needed to play with, the urgency we need to play with. You would think, with all the stuff we’d gone through the last couple of years that we would never take a possession for granted and play every game, every play like it was our last because you never know when the game is going to get taken away from you. That’s the mentality we needed as a team and I didn’t do a good job of voicing that and showing it myself.”
Bueckers had 24 points, an efficient 10 for 15 from the floor, with six steals and five rebounds. Aaliyah Edwards had 12. Among the freshman Arnold, with 12 points, and Ashlynn Shade, with 10, were most productive and on a night, with Fudd out, when those contributions were bound to make a difference.
Wins over solid Big Ten programs like Maryland, ranked 20th coming in, can no longer be taken for granted. All around the country, the pool of elite players is larger than ever, which means there are more good teams. That the top two teams in the preseason poll, LSU and Uconn, lost during the first week points that up.
But however the larger picture changes, beating Uconn, like beating the Yankees or Patriots, will always mean something to the other side, which is why the Huskies can’t afford to play without their edge.
“I thought they guarded even harder in this game,” Maryland coach Brenda Frese said. “They made every pass (difficult), you saw all the deflections, 16 steals, they forced us into 27 turnovers. Their defensive intensity was far greater coming back home to a tremendous environment.”
For sure, the Huskies weren’t about to be pushed around in this game, as they were at NC State, and they were not about to give up 92 points, nor 30-plus to one player, as they did with Saniya Rivers.
“Effort,” Auriemma said. “Effort. … Yeah. That might be the first time in I don’t know how many years when we had that many steals. We used to do that back in the day. It’s harder to play like that when you only have six players, but when we have more players available to us, we can take more chances, we can press up a little bit more.”
It all comes back around to attitude. The Huskies have Bueckers, they have freshmen Geno Auriemma trusts with important minutes. This season, they have the ingredients to produce a happier ending than the last several seasons, if the Huskies play angry, and sustain it.
“We learned a little bit about how we’ve got to play and what happens when they punch back,” Auriemma said. “I just think we became a little bit better team today. We approached the game with a different mindset.”