Hurley calls out social media slight after Elite Eight victory
Says Huskies, Big East deserve more respect
Uconn coach Dan Hurley says he doesn't go on social media much. He has his notifications turned off for X, formerly Twitter, which “has been a game changer” for him.
But there are still a few posts that get his attention.
When the Elite Eight was matchup set, Uconn to play Illinois, much of the internet thought the Big Ten tournament champions might have had the best shot of any team to challenge the Huskies on their way back to the Final Four.
After Uconn dominated the Illini, 77-52 on Saturday night, Hurley called out a post by Sean Harrington, a former Illinois basketball player and a current ESPN analyst, that was sent to him by a staffer.
In response to an original post that claimed Uconn had no answer for Illinois star Terrence Shannon Jr., Harrington responded to a commenter who suggested he'd never heard of Stephon Castle, the freshman who helped hold Northwestern's star scorer Boo Buie to just 2-for-15 from the field two rounds prior.
“UCONN (sic) has not had to deal with a team as athletic and physical as Illini,” Harrington's response read. “And please don't compare Shannon to Buie. Shannon is not going to be held to single digits and Castle will be in foul trouble. NW was down 2 starters in the game vs UCONN. Buie was their entire focus.”
Shannon (eight points, 2-for-12) didn't score with Castle on the court until there were six minutes and 34 seconds left in the game. By that point, Uconn had already blown the Illini out of the water with a 30-0 run bridging from the end of the first half through the start of the second, holding them scoreless for 50 minutes of real time, almost nine minutes of game time. The Huskies never trailed.
“Statements like that are just asinine,” Hurley said in the postgame press conference with Castle to his left and Donovan Clingan, who terrorized the Illini in the paint all game, two seats over. “You're going against beasts and monsters every night in the Big East and the Big East prepared us for teams like Illinois… I like the slights, there's obviously a lot of experts out there and maybe people that follow different conferences haven't seen Big East basketball, but we're both on FOX, the Big 10 and Big East, he probably could've caught some more of those games.”
Hurley loves the external slights that he can twist into motivation. When he found out in a CBS interview after Uconn beat Northwestern in Brooklyn that the Huskies would play the early Sweet 16 game in Boston, he said: “Okay, so that gives me a little bit more ‘us against the world' stuff that I could utilize because I do think that the committee has tried to make this as difficult as they can on us.”
Illinois players and coach Brad Underwood, in pre-game press conferences on Friday, suggested that they'd seen teams like Uconn in the Big 10 already this season and those experiences gave them confidence going into Saturday's Elite Eight.
“We play physicality every single day the way we practice, the league we play in, I think it was the under12 media (timeout) or the under-8, I think we were up 30, and Coach was like, ‘Remember what these guys were saying yesterday? We gotta go put them away,'” said Clingan, the East Region's Most Outstanding player who finished with 22 points, 10 rebounds, five blocks and three steals.
“We heard the things the players were saying in the lead-up to this one,” Hurley said. “As defending national champs and what we've done since last February and what we've done in this tournament, we feel like we've earned a certain level of respect from media and opposing players when they face us right now. Because we've been that good.”
Uconn's 25-point win against the Illini set a new NCAA Tournament record for consecutive doubledigit wins. The Huskies have won 10-straight by at least 13 points in the last two tournaments.
The Huskies will meet Alabama in the Final Four on Saturday. In his postgame press conference after advancing with a win over Clemson, head coach Nate Oats didn't make the same mistake.
“We've got to figure out how to beat Uconn. They went on a 30-0 run I heard tonight. Is that correct? That's unheard of in the Elite Eight. That's crazy,” he said. “The Athletic wrote an article about Danny has the formula figured out. His formula is working out pretty well. I'm going to have to figure out that formula myself here soon.”
Oats got his college coaching start as an assistant to Hurley's older brother, Bobby, at Buffalo in 2013. It will be the first Final Four appearance for Alabama.
Karaban, Johnson have dunks to remember, or not:
Uconn wasn't stressed out when it took a fivepoint lead into halftime despite continuing shooting struggles. The Huskies blew the game open in the second half and were able to have some fun, which they've gotten used to in March.
Backup center Samson Johnson provided an early firework when he cut to the basket on a fastbreak and caught a pass from Hassan Diarra. The 6-10 junior nicknamed “Slamson” took flight from outside the restricted area and hammered in the dunk, his head at the rim.
“I'm not gonna lie, that felt like a regular play for me,” he said. Those plays have become somewhat regular for him. “But my teammates were like, ‘That was a crazy (expletive) dunk.' That felt like a normal dunk to me, I don't know.”
Alex Karaban, a Massachusetts native and a Boston Celtics fan, had one in the home arena of his favorite NBA team that definitely didn't feel normal.
Near the end of Uconn's 30-0 scoring run, he caught an outlet pass from Newton and coasted to the rim where he finished a two-handed slam through contact from Shannon. Karaban hung on the rim for five seconds after the foul was called, and lowered himself with some help from Diarra.
“That was my favorite highlight of the game just because I've been to this arena so many times,” he said. “And when I dunk it, I never hang on the rim. Layup lines you never see me hanging on the rim, practice never. For some reason, I don't know. Something told me to hang on the rim and doing it in the city I love, doing it in the arena I love, I'm always gonna look back at it.
“I was blacked-out, not gonna lie. I was kinda confused why I was on the rim because I don't dunk a lot.”