The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
UConn men facing big test at No. 18 Arizona
Huskies look to break through vs. ranked foe
TUCSON, Arizona — The last time UConn defeated a Top 25 team on the road was Jan. 16, 2014, when the Huskies topped No. 17 Memphis at FedExForum.
Since then, UConn has played five true road games against ranked foes. The Huskies have lost all five of those games. The average deficit: 19.2 points.
Things won’t get any easier Thursday, when UConn faces No. 18 Arizona at the McKale Center (9 p.m., ESPN2).
The Huskies are 7-3, but that’s a little deceiving. They’ve needed overtime to beat a pair of midmajors (Columbia and Monmouth) at home, and struggled to put away winless Coppin State in their last game before exam break on Dec. 9.
Arizona is 9-3, but that’s a little deceiving, too. The Wildcats dropped three straight games to then-unranked teams (NC State, SMU and Purdue) at the Battle 4 Atlantis last month. Arizona was without high-scoring guard Rawle Alkins.
Since that awful performance in the Bahamas, the Wildcats have reeled off six straight wins, including No. 8 Texas A&M and a strong Alabama squad. Alkins returned three games ago, and ’Zona is starting to take on the look of a team that had Final Four aspirations at the start of the season.
Oh, and the Wildcats have also won a program-record 46 straight nonconference home games, the second longest streak in the nation, topped only by Duke (137
straight). Not an easy place to play.
So what does it take to win a tough road game — or any road game, for that matter?
“It really just takes the whole team to stay connected,” junior guard Jalen Adams said. “If everybody’s connected, I believe we’ll compete with the best of them. When we start getting separated and not staying together, that’s when it gets difficult to beat tough teams like this.”
It’s not like coach Kevin Ollie hasn’t won tough games away from home in the past, as a player and coach. None of those six wins in the 2014 NCAA tournament were at home.
“You’ve got to have poise, you’ve got to have great leadership,” Ollie said. “Arizona is a team of runs, so you’ve got to be able to bounce back and recover. You’ve got to have a tough mentality, and you have to be connected. If we can do all those things, you give yourself a fighting chance.”
Arizona has as much talent as any team in the country, and leading the way is a freshman. Deandre Ayton, a 7-foot-1 forward, is averaging a double-double — 20.3 points and 11.8 rebounds per game. In fact, he’s one of just four players in the country to average at least 20 points and 10 boards a contest while shooting at least 60 percent from the field.
The Huskies’ young, relatively inexperienced front line hasn’t seen anything like Ayton yet and probably won’t the rest of this season. Eric Cobb, the 6-8, 280-pound JUCO transfer who began his career at South Carolina, is ready for the challenge.
“I’ve got to come out and bring my best,” Cobb said. “Same goes for the team. We’ve got to come out as a whole and make him feel uncomfortable.”
Indeed, it will likely take a village to stop Ayton.