The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Evidence of Success
Bouknight’s NBA future bodes well for UConn, Hurley
UConn coach Dan Hurley will hug James Bouknight Thursday night at the Barclays Center and watch him head off into a lucrative basketball future.
This goodbye-for-now moment is the latest step in a program’s reemergence. Bouknight will shake NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s hand and pull on the cap of whatever team that makes him the centerpiece of its draft night plans, and he’ll do so as a UConn flagbearer — as a symbol for what is possible, for what is happening, in Storrs.
“We fit each other perfectly,” Hurley said Tuesday. “We needed James’ talent. James needed our structure and accountability. Perfect partnership.”
In achievement and perception, UConn is a program on the rise. The incremental steps of Hurley’s first three seasons resulted in simply surviving 2018-19, thriving toward the end of 2019-20 season cut short due to COVID-19, and breaking through last season in the empty gyms of the ongoing pandemic to reach the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2016.
Recruiting classes are stronger by the year. UConn is already considered, again, an upper-tier Big East team/program. Expectations are high for a deep, experienced team in 2021-22. And now the coaching staff’s best recruit and the team’s best player, Bouknight, is about to be an NBA lottery pick, UConn’s first since 2012.
Bouknight’s college experience was abbreviated. Just 46 games in two years.
A dynamic sophomore season disrupted by elbow surgery, isolation, COVID pauses, canceled games. But his rise, his maturation, did mirror that of a program that re-entered the Big East last season and scratched its way back into a national conversation.
The Bouknight Era is a short story about trust and development, which Hurley is selling to the next batch of recruits.
“It’s one thing when a player comes into a program and he’s already preordained as the No. 1 pick or a top-five pick,” Hurley said. “He’s on a campus for several months and leaves. I’m not sure how much player development actually goes on there. With a situation like James’, when you talk about your player development and what we try to do at UConn in terms of an 11-month-a-year commitment to helping our players get to the highest level, he’s certainly a poster child. We’ve had a lot of guys improve their stock. But James is the poster child. James’ impact will be felt for a long time.”
The Husky logo is a shinier these days. The brand’s foundation is stronger. When Hurley gathers returning players next week at the Werth Champions Center, he won’t point to one in particular as the next lottery pick or star. He will, however, be looking at a team that expects to be great as much as it hopes to.
“The guys have a lot of evidence in their career of success and playing well and winning significant games last year,” Hurley said. “There’s a certain level of confidence a group gets when they’ve had a successful season. When you’re a player that’s had really great moments in a successful season, you come into that next season with a lot more confidence because there’s actual evidence as opposed to you just telling yourself that you’re a good player. And we’re lucky that we’re in a situation now where we have players who have evidence of success.”
Donyell Marshall led to Ray Allen, who led to Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon, to Kemba Walker, so many others mixed into a run in which UConn won four national titles in 16 years. The best leave early. They leave their mark, too.
Sophomores Adama Sanogo and Andre Jackson are most like Bouknight in that there are certain elements of their skill set that scream NBA potential. Hurley expects Sanogo to be “a great player for us sooner rather than later.” Jackson, derailed by injuries and problems acclimating amid the pandemic last season, has made great strides.
Seniors R.J. Cole, Isaiah Whaley, Tyler Polley and Tyrese Martin are solid. Cole, Hurley said, “has supreme confidence in his ability to elevate his game (and is) a guy who understands this has to be his team with the absence of James.”
Juniors Jalen Gaffney and Akok Akok, fully healthy after the devastating Achilles’ injury, are so intriguing. Some freshmen have the same flashy potential Bouknight did when he debuted in late 2019.
“You can’t replace a star like (Bouknight) with just somebody else,” Hurley said. “What we do have, though, is a number of really, really good players. We probably have seven, eight, nine, potentially 10 guys, that can get us somewhere between seven and 14-15 [points] a game. … The strength of this team is going to be the balance.”
The conversations are different now, about opportunity and refining a product rather than rescuing something, this turnaround coming amid the changing landscape of amateur sports and players’ ability to cash in on their name, image and likeness.
Hurley said he has already been asked by recruits and/or parents and/ or representatives what kind of money a player can make by choosing to attend UConn.
“We’re going to attract kids here that want to be part of one of the great brands in all of college basketball, that want to be part of a program striving for its fifth national championship, that want to be developed by a great group of coaches that want to help them absolutely maximize their careers as professionals,” Hurley said. “And we’ll put them in the absolute best position that we can to take advantage of the NIL here at UConn. … A state like this that only has the one professional sports team, with the WNBA, to be in a market like this without (other) professional sports, you would think UConn basketball players will have a lot of great opportunities.”
The Storrs campus is carved into the thick woods of Eastern Connecticut, but it is the self-proclaimed basketball capital of the world. The men’s team didn’t hold up its end of the bargain to that claim for a handful of years. That team is back. Not all the way. Getting there, though.
“Kids want to play, they want to win and they want to be developed, given the best chance to get to the NBA,” Hurley said. “We’re showing that you’ll win here. We’re showing that if you have NBA talent you can develop here and get there on a pretty fast track.”
Hurley said he’d be willing to add a player or two to the upcoming season’s roster, should high school players consider reclassifying classes. None who go that route will play for the Huskies in 2021-22, though. They would have to redshirt.
“Because with this team we have returning, I have no more minutes for anybody,” Hurley said. “It’s going to be a war for roles and minutes with this team. I don’t need any more guys in here that are going to be looking at me to put them in the game.”