The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Things are looking up
Dan Hurley enters third season at the helm with high expectations
In Year 3 of a UConn rebuild, will we see a kinder, gentler Dan Hurley? Or at least a coach who’s more composed on the sidelines, more apt to allow his players to bring energy and leadership to games, rather than try to bring it all himself?
History would suggest so. Hurley has always said that, when his team improves and has better talent, he is a much more relaxed coach — on the sidelines, off the court, everywhere. It happened in his second and final season at Wagner. It happened in the final two of his six seasons at Rhode Island.
Armed with a deep, talented (if largely unproven) roster — not to mention the specter of playing games with no fans, where his barbs at referees will be fully audible on TV — Hurley could very well be a different kind of coach than what we saw in his first two seasons at UConn.
“There’s probably less of a feeling that he has to be the engine driving the competitive fire of the group,” assistant coach Tom Moore said. “When that’s the case, when you have to do less pushing and clapping and showing outward passion and reacting, you can do more thinking and analyzing. I think he’ll coach just as hard, but I think the group will be a little more assured, know how we want to play and what the expectation level is.”
And make no mistake: Hurley has high expectations this season.
“I think Dan really feels good about his team, based on our conversations,” said his brother, Bobby, who coaches a pretty good team of his own at Arizona State. “I think he really likes his team.”
FROM PSYCHO TO PSYCHIC
Two years ago, as Hurley was set to begin his first season at UConn, he was talking about how he had changed as a coach during his tenure at Rhode Island.
Notoriously animated on the sidelines and harsh on
officials in his first couple of seasons, Hurley had mellowed out quite a bit as the Rams got good and started winning NCAA tournament games in his final two years at the helm.
But, he warned at the time, “That goes out the window this year.”
It was Year 1 of a rebuild, of transforming a moribund program back to prominence. He inherited a roster without a lot of talent and with even less leadership. Hurley knew he was going to be the one who had to provide it. Even though he wouldn’t take a single shot, grab a single rebound, he was the one who had to bring energy to the team.
He brought it alright. There was his loud, energetic postgame locker-room celebration after the Huskies had nipped Morehead State in their season-opener, as if they had just knocked off Duke. There was the famous chestbump with Jalen Adams after beating Syracuse, followed within seconds by a composed hand-shake with Jim Boeheim.
But it wasn’t always pretty. The night after the Syracuse win, Hurley was ejected from the Huskies’ 19-point loss to Iowa. He was ejected again on Jan. 16 in a loss at Tulsa. There were plenty of sideline histrionics, more technicals.
At the onset of last season, Year 2, Hurley went from psycho to psychic. He predicted his team would show growth and be more talented and competitive. He also predicted there would be plenty of “excruciating losses” along the way.
Hurley was right on the money. Just ask Hurley.
“I predicted it perfectly,” he said. “Unfortunately, it all came to fruition. I was fully prepared for the way the season unfolded. I did think we should have won a couple of more of those close games, those lessons and mistakes we made down the stretch of games, they should have stuck more. We probably played to more of a 21-win team than we did a 19-win team in the regular season last year. But the silver lining was that we did learn how to win again as a program.”
Hurley has, of course, been through all this before. At St. Benedict’s Prep, he took over a middling program in the middle of a dilapidated section of Newark and built it up over
nine years to where it was consistently churning out future college and pro standouts like Tristan Thompason, J.R. Smith and Corey Stokes. He inherited a Wagner program that had won five games the year before his arrival and won 25 games in his second season.
URI had won a mere seven games the year before he took over. In Year 3, Rhody won 23 games and advanced to the second round of the NIT. Year 4 was derailed by injury, but in his final two seasons, the Rams — who hadn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 1999 — advanced to the second round of the Big Dance both times.
And, of course, after inheriting a UConn program that had suffered an unusual two straight losing seasons marked by multiple ugly, blowout losses, Hurley got things on the right track in Year 1 and predicted the improvements of Year 2.
“It’s sort of progressed the way he’s expected it to progress,” said Moore. “When things happen the way you hope they’re gonna happen, as a coach, I think it empowers you. I think it gives you that much more confidence, that sort of subtle feeling that you’re doing things right, and what you’re doing is working and your plan is working.”
Moore has been with Hurley on both ends of the rebuild spectrum. He joined URI’s staff in 201718, Hurley’s final season with the Rams, and watched him guide the program to 26 wins.
“He was so much differ
ent than when I went against him (as coach at Quinnipiac) in Year 1 at Wagner,” Moore recalled. “I saw him on the sidelines Year 1, 2, 3 at Rhode Island. He was different in Year 6 at Rhode Island.”
About a week after that season ended with a second-round NCAA tourney loss to Duke, Moore was back with Hurley for Year 1 at UConn.
Now, Year 3.
‘HE’LL BE JUST AS FIERY’
Obviously, the entire 2020-21 college basketball season will live under the shroud of COVID-19, which threatens to postpone or cancel games on a nightly basis, and perhaps even threaten the season itself. UConn, slated to begin its season on Wednesday against CCSU, hasn’t even released its schedule yet.
Assuming there is some semblance of a season, however, the Huskies figure to be very competitive in their return to the Big East.
The talent is there. Consecutive national top-20 recruiting classes have brought in players like James Bouknight, a potential 2021 NBA lottery pick; Andre Jackson, another potential future firstrounder; Akok Akok, Jalen Gaffney and Adama Sanogo. A pair of transfers — high-scoring point guard R.J. Cole and tough, versatile wing Tyrese Martin — are expected to make big impacts in their UConn debuts. Veterans like Isaiah Whaley, Tyler Polley and Brendan Adams have shown marked improvement under Hurley’s watch.
“I know he’s very athletic
in the frontcourt, they’ve got great size, and some really exciting young guys,” his brother Bobby said. “I’m really looking forward to watching UConn play this year.”
How could this change Dan Hurley as a coach?
“I think he’ll be just as fiery and just as animated,” Moore predicted. “I do think he’s gonna expect our guys to carry more of their share of the intensity. I don’t know that he expects to kick back in a chair and not do much. I do think he expects our guys to carry more energy, more confidence as a group and as a team.”
Where will that energy, confidence and leadership come from? Christian Vital, a fiery, emotional competitor on the floor who matured as a leader over the latter half of last season, has graduated. Of course, he was also too often prone to poor on-court decisionmaking, and famously clashed with Hurley multiple times in their two seasons together.
Whaley, Polley and Josh Carlton provide veteran presence. Cole and Gaffney, as point guards, will be asked to lead. But the best bet may be Bouknight.
All reports from practice note that the team’s best player may also be its best leader. Bouknight has been much more vocal, helping younger players and guiding older ones. He appears to be on a mission this season.
And that can only help make his coach’s job in Year 3 much easier.