The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
UConn men face off with Central Florida tonight
STORRS — Injuries can be a convenient excuse in sports. Not for the UCF men’s basketball team, apparently.
Consider what the Knights have gone through already this season. Before the season even started, Aubrey Dawkins, the Michigan transfer and coach’s son who was expected to be a big addition to the team, was felled by a season-ending shoulder injury.
Then, in UCF’s very first game of the season, leading scorer B.J. Taylor suffered a foot injury and hasn’t played since.
Add in some nagging injuries to 7-foot-6 center Tacko Fall that kept him out of some practices and earlyseason games, and the Knights could easily be wallowing in their own misfortune.
Yet here they are at 12-4 overall and 3-1 in the American Conference, heading into Wednesday’s bout with UConn at Gampel Pavilion (7 p.m., CBS Sports Network).
“Everyone’s stepped up,” said UCF coach Johnny Dawkins, the former Duke star and Stanford head man. “We talked about handling adversity in the preseason, and ironically right around that time B.J. went out, my son went out, Tacko missed a lot of practices. We were like, ‘Wow, we just discussed this, and now we’re going through it.’ So, our guys were somewhat prepared from the standpoint that no one is going to quit.”
UConn, of course, has lost starting point guard Alterique Gilbert for the season for a second year in a row. Otherwise, the Huskies are fairly healthy — though they’re now down another player, as sophomore forward Eric Cobb has been suspended indefinitely from the team.
The Huskies haven’t handled adversity quite as well, checking in at 8-7 overall, 1-2 AAC and not even in the RPI Top 100. No doubt, losing Gilbert has hurt — since he sustained his shoulder injury in the second half of a loss against Michigan State, the Huskies are 4-7 with two losses of 25 points or more and some unnecessarily close calls against bad teams.
Still, there’s enough talent on this roster — certainly as much as UCF currently has — to be better than where they are.
Coach Kevin Ollie offered no comment about Cobb’s suspension after practice on Tuesday.
“We’re just gonna play with the guys we’ve got out there,” he said. “I really trust those guys that we’ve got on the basketball court now.”
It would seem to be a particularly bad time to lose a 6-foot-8, 280-pound forward heading into a game facing one of the tallest men on Earth. Fall currently leads the nation in field-goal percentage (.772), leads the AAC in blocked shots (2.0 per game) and is fourth in rebounding (7.4).
The Huskies have done a good job in recent years containing Fall, but that was with 7-0 center Amida Brimah on the roster. UConn currently doesn’t employ a player taller than 6-9. One of those 6-9 players is freshman Josh Carlton, who has started the past two games and figures to body up against Fall on Wednesday night. Carlton has a game plan. “Really, on the defensive end, just keep a body on him, get into his legs so they
can’t just throw easy lobs into him,” he said. “And on offense, make sure I get into him, make sure he can’t really jump to be able to block my shot.”
Added Terry Larrier:
“You’ve just got to try to stop him early off the pick-androlls, when he’s rolling. Don’t let him get too close to the basket. That’s pretty much it. There’s not really too much you can do for that.”
The Huskies can only hope they have enough manpower — no excuses accepted — to do the job.