Golden opportunity
Huskies will tip off a challenging week by facing No. 10 Marquette
After the miserable slide that followed a 14-0 start, the Uconn men’s basketball team has won three of its last four, albeit against the bottom three teams in the Big East, and appears to have made strides back to where it started.
How far have the Huskies come?
They’ll find out this week. It starts with No. 10 Marquette in Hartford on Tuesday. The Golden Eagles are surprisingly the highest-ranked team in the conference and tied atop the standings despite being picked to finish ninth in the preseason. Then, the Huskies will fly out to Omaha for a tough matchup against red-hot No. 23 Creighton.
Marquette, 11-2 in conference play with four weeks until the Big East Tournament, beat Uconn 82-76 at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee Jan. 11. The Huskies’ main contributors in that game were freshmen Donovan Clingan and Alex Karaban, who produced a combined 37 points and 17 rebounds. Clingan added five blocks.
Jordan Hawkins and Tristen Newton, who’ve stepped up as main scorers for the Huskies lately, scored a combined 15 points on 4-for-16 shooting in that one.
Adama Sanogo mustered 10 points and three rebounds with five turnovers in the game; he played under 20 minutes for the first time since the season opener.
“You can look at it I guess in one or two ways,” Uconn head coach Dan Hurley said Monday. “Obviously we were fortunate to be in the game under the circumstances and I guess you could take some confidence from that, but [we’re] obviously gonna have to play a whole lot better, especially on the defensive end.”
Stopping the Golden Eagles won’t be an easy task. They push the pace behind point guard Tyler Kolek, who was named a Top 10 candidate for the Bob Cousy Award on Monday, which recognizes the best point guard in the country.
Kolek is averaging 11.3 points and is second in the nation with 7.9 assists per game.
“Shaka (Smart) has done a great job with them. They create turnovers, they play athletic, they attack your ball so if you’re not sharp they make it tough,” Hurley said of Marquette. “[Olivier-maxence] Prosper was very physical
come full circle,” Collier told the Courant. “When I left here, having kids wasn’t like the first thing on my mind, so to have her here just feels like I’m really an adult thing. And it’s just a little bit surreal because last time I was in XL I was playing on the court.”
Collier was back in Connecticut as the latest engagement of her marketing deal with the WNBA that allows her to stay stateside with her family instead of playing overseas. The league has made a push to have players return to games at their alma maters this season to improve crossover interest from the college game to the pros. She also spoke on the Fox broadcast of the game, led fans in a chant at midcourt between the third and fourth quarters and tossed out T-shirts.
It’s been quite the busy past year for Collier. She gave birth on May 25 and shocked the basketball world by getting back on the court for Minnesota less than three months later on Aug. 7, in an effort to play with legend Sylvia Fowles in her last season. In October she got married to longtime partner Alex Bazzell, a trainer who works with high-profile athletes in the NBA and college basketball whom she met while playing for Uconn.
Collier has been fulfilling different obligations as part of her marketing agreement since then, from representing the Lynx at the WNBA Draft Lottery, to attending the NBA Game in Paris alongside former Husky Gabby Williams, to events with the local community in Minneapolis. She’ll be attending the NBA All-star Game in Utah on Feb. 19 to promote the league as well.
Collier has been balancing raising Mila and getting back in prime basketball shape through it all. And on Monday, she was back on the court with USA Basketball for a national team minicamp Minneapolis.
“It’s been really crazy,” Collier said. “It’s like, what am I going to do this year to top that? So yeah, I mean it’s been a really crazy year, but I’m just really excited to get back with my team on the court and go through a full preseason with them and then get ready for the season. So really just looking forward to that right now.”
Having Mila by her side has helped Collier stay grounded through such a hectic stretch.
“She makes everything so much better,” Collier said. “It’s crazy and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s so rewarding. And every time I see her smile, it just washes away any worry that I have.”
Mila’s favorite toy right now is a small squishy basketball, which Collier says she chews on all the time. She hopes that’s a sign her daughter will follow in her footsteps and play the sport one day, but Collier doesn’t want to force anything onto her. In terms of watching, though, Mila isn’t quite there yet.
“She’s not impressed, she’s sleeping,” Collier said when asked Mila’s first impressions of the XL Center at halftime. “She’s used to it … I came to Minnesota when she was six weeks, so she’s been sleeping in arenas her whole life already.”
It was quite the environment to sleep through on Sunday, as the XL Center was sold out with 15,564 fans in attendance — the first sell-out since a game against Notre Dame on Dec. 3, 2017, back when Collier was playing for the Huskies.
In the days leading up to coming to the game, a memory popped up on Collier’s phone of when head coach Geno Auriemma recruited her as a junior in high school. To watch Auriemma still on the sidelines, getting upset about the same things he did when she played for him, alongside fellow former players who all remain super close no matter when they wore the Uconn uniform with her daughter in tow, was a special experience.
“It feels like it was yesterday and simultaneously like it was so long ago, so to see him still here ... It’s really cool to see,” Collier said. “You come back and it’s the same. We have a lot of the same staff from when I was here, it’s just like you jump back into right what it was when you were in college.”