Hurley, McDermott: No easy games in Big East this year
When referring to his own career at Seton Hall one time a few years ago, Dan Hurley referred to the league in which he played as “the real Big East.”
It’s never easy to know when Hurley is being sarcastic or serious, but few would doubt that the Big East of the mid-1990s were superior to the league’s current iteration.
Not that the Big East is anything to sneeze at nowadays. The league was the best in the nation last season, per NET and KenPom rankings, and is up near the top again.
And Hurley has certainly been impressed by what he’s seen from this version of the Big East so far.
“You watch these games and see how hard it is to win a game in a league that’s maybe the best conference in the country, or top two or three at the worst,” he said. “It wasn’t lost on me that every team in the league is a KenPom top-100, which is the only conference in the country with that.”
Indeed, entering Sunday’s action, Villanova was ranked No. 4 in the KenPom rankings. Creighton, which edged UConn in overtime on Sunday, was ranked No.
13, followed by Marquette (40), UConn (45), Seton Hall (46), Xavier (48), Providence (62), Butler
(66), DePaul (81), St. John’s (90) and Georgetown (98).
“There’s not a win that we would get — and hopefully we’ll
get some this year — that you ever have to apologize for,” Hurley added.
Big East teams are 38-13 (.745) overall in non-conference play.
While Creighton may seem like a Big East newbie to most UConn fans, head coach Greg McDermott & Co. are now in their seventh season in the conference.
“There’s not gonna be any easy games,” McDermott said shortly after the Bluejays’ win over
UConn at Gampel Pavilion. “You’d better get excited with any win that you can get, because it’s a grind-it-out league. It was that before. Now, you add a program with the history and tradition of UConn, Coach Hurley does an unbelievable job preparing his team to compete at a high level. It’s obvious they take on his personality, and that’s a sign of a really well-coached team. Throughout the league, there’s nothing that’s gonna be easy. People are gonna have to figure out a way to get through these disruptions. We had one early, obviously UConn’s
just coming out of one. That’s probably going to continue to happen as the season goes on. You’ve just got to appreciate every game you can possibly play.”
SLAM JORDAN
Jordan Pettway may not get to play a single game this season at Division III Endicott College, which has had multiple shutdowns that have put its entire season in jeopardy. But Pettway, a senior from Bridgeport, has created a nice niche for himself in the basketball world.
For much of the past seven months, Pettway has been interning for SLAM, a basketball-oriented media company. He’s edited videos of interviews with star players (Chris Paul, Ray Allen, Paul George) remotely, as well as a humorous video of Dion Waiters and J.R. Smith that went viral and got about 200,000 views on social media.
Pettway is a former Hearst Connecticut Media second-team All-State selection in 2015-16 as a senior at Notre Dame-Fairfield. He prepped a year at Putnam Science Academy before enrolling at Endicott.
NO DOUBTING THOMAS
It was a career night for Woodbridge’s Tyler Thomas on Thursday. The Sacred Heart sophomore notched career-highs in points (23), rebounds (9) and assists (6) to lead the Pioneers to their first victory of the season, 87-72 over LIU. Thomas, an Amity High grad , leads SHU in scoring at 16 points per game.