Lack of answers brutal for Huskies

Dan Hurley had an explanation why he didn’t play Adama Sanogo for the final 12 minutes and 46 seconds.

What Captain Brutality didn’t have an answer for is why Posh Alexander made his guards look like Posh Spice on this Monday afternoon at Gampel Pavilion. Why St. John’s was tougher than his team down the stretch in a 74-70 victory over the No. 23 Huskies.

And perhaps most painful of all: Why both losses UConn has suffered in an otherwise impressive season involved butchering vital free throws in the closing seconds. First, it was R.J. Cole against Creighton. This time, the Huskies missed four of eight down the stretch. This time it was Tyrese Martin, after hitting a big 3-pointer from the corner, with a chance to put UConn ahead, missing two free throws with 18 seconds left.

“A brutal loss,” Hurley said. There WAS one beautiful thing about this game. Those throwback uniforms with the full Connecticut script were pristine. They were some sharp, certainly sharper than the players inside them.

Except for Cole’s 3-point shooting early, a productive stretch by Martin in the second half and the emergence of freshman Sanogo … yuck.

The pandemic obviously has made for a strange, uneven schedule. Just when the Huskies put together a four-game win streak, including three in a row on the road — two without their best player — a potentially rousing challenge at home against Villanova gets postponed due to COVID.

It was exactly a year ago Monday, after a close loss at Villanova, that a defiant Hurley said: “People better get us now. That’s all. You better get us now. Because it’s coming.”

And it certainly has been coming. The recruiting. The widespread interest. A strong finish to last year before COVID shut down the postseason. A 7-1 start that pushed UConn into the Top 25 for the first time since 2016 and as high as No. 23 entering this game.

Without a doubt, the loss for at least a few more weeks of

James Bouknight after Koby McEwen fell on his elbow at Marquette is substantial. UConn’s scoring options obviously drop without Bouknight, a process that is continually being sorted out, a process that short-circuited in this one after Red Storm coach Mike Anderson went to a small lineup in the final 12:46. Sanogo had 12 points, and despite missing a couple of other bunnies, had become the Huskies’ biggest force. He was looking big and good.

“We couldn’t play Adama,” Hurley said. “With (Julian) Champagnie or (Marcellus) Earlington at the 5 for literally the last 10-12 minutes, and Champagnie is a Player of the Year candidate who is a wing and Earlington was lighting us up (with three 3s), the only option would be to put him on one of the guards. It put us in a bad spot.”

The Huskies were up 49-41 when Sanogo went out. They were outscored 33-21 afterward.

“I do think we would have tried to keep throwing it inside to him, because he was really the only one who had it going,” Hurley said.

UConn had a 14-point lead in the first half at home against a team that was 2-6 in the Big East, and that 49-41 second-half lead. It didn’t matter if Ray Allen, Kemba Walker or Bouknight was missing. They should have closed this one out. Instead it was St. John’s with the energy and a steady hand on the steering wheel.

Instead it was missed free throws.

“That’s an individual thing,” Hurley said. “That’s a routine. That’s having the nerves and confidence to make them. It’s breathing. It’s wanting to be there … As a coach you’re pretty helpless on that one. A lot of that is routine and having the stomach to get up there and making them.”

Things got a little giddy around here in the past week. The hot sauce stuff is terrific for the fans, gets them involved, and the donations will get tickets for games to kids who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

The players celebrating Hurley’s birthday the other day by giving him a T-shirt that read “Captain Brutality” was a nice touch, too. Especially after Tyler Polley got a black eye in practice and the Huskies were looking like the hungriest pack of howling dogs east of the Mississippi.

“An endless supply of intensity,” Hurley said in describing Captain Brutality’s superpowers. “An unreasonable demand for effort and accountability. An ability to set the standard always a little bit higher than anyone can actually get to. A tunnel vision on the season only and nothing else.”

Only the fruits of those powers were not on display in this one. Alexander, as Hurley said, destroyed the Huskies off the dribble. The defense did a bad job getting out on the 3-point line in the final 20 minutes. While shutting down Big East scoring leader Champagnie for most of the game, they let Earlington and Dylan AddaeWusu sting them. It was St. John’s that looked like the deeper team.

“Posh dominated our guards the last 10 minutes,” said Captain Brutality in employing the word brutal.

It’s also true that no Bouknight equals no guarantees on offense.

“That’s a problem and it’s going to be a problem,” Hurley said. “We can overcome that problem, but we can’t give up 74 points. We’ve got to play elite defense and we got beat to so many loose balls and offensive rebounds (10) there. We’re not winning a game like today that’s played in the 70s with some of the limitations we have offensively.

“There’s no one that can come close to filling the role that James can fill, but we can still overcome it if we don’t miss the free throws, if we don’t get driven, if we don’t get beat to the loose stuff. We need some more from some people to overcome it. If you take one of the best players in the country off your team that’s going to cause a lot of problems when we don’t have a lot of natural scorers.”

Without Bouknight, Hurley said, the Huskies need a big sophomore bump out of Jalen Gaffney.

“Now we’re desperate to get improved play. He’s got to believe in himself,” Hurley said.

He said he needed more from Brendan Adams, too. Between the two of them, Adams and Gaffney played 40 minutes and got two field goals. After those terrific games that led Polley to be named Big East player of the week, Hurley didn’t mince any words about his 2-for-8 shooting, 1-for-6 on 3s, and minus-18 when he was on the court. Swaggy T has to show without Bouknight.

“They’re a quick athletic team and they just got into him,” Hurley said. “Tyler has to get better moving without the ball. Tyler has to get better using screens. Tyler has to learn to stop rounding off his cuts and making sharper cuts. From a personality standpoint, he needed to keep himself mentally in that game.

“He had that look on his face that the game was going bad for him. Now you have that broken play where he gets that trail 3 and the opportunity to step into one and make a gamechanging shot. He put himself in a bad way because his defense in the first half was really, really bad. He carried that to the offensive end.”

Polley is not great at shooting 3s on the move, but he did have a good look with nine seconds left that could have put UConn up one. He missed.

The one guy Hurley isn’t looking for more from right now is Akok Akok, who returned from Achilles surgery on Jan. 9 but has been used sparingly.

“What Akok can do and what Akok wants to do, it’s a challenging situation,” Hurley said. “He’s a heart and soul, a pillar of this thing …. Bouk and Akok are building blocks building this thing in Year 3 to make this big move. Akok’s not ready to be out there physically.”

And on this day too many who were ready didn’t do the job.