Hurley hopes team shows ‘UConn pride’
STORRS — If Dan Hurley remembers correctly, he watched the 1999 national championship game with his brother, Bobby. Might have been a bit awkward.
Bobby Hurley, after all, won consecutive national titles at Duke. But there was nothing he could do that night some 20 years ago when UConn beat the Blue Devils 77-74 at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., for its first national championship.
What Dan Hurley definitely remembers about that night was how much he admired the Jim Calhouncoached Huskies’ style of play.
“I remember how they won that game on toughness, without a lot of firstround picks,” Hurley noted. “And (Duke) had, who, Elton Brand, William Avery, Shane Battier? They were wolves on that UConn team. That’s why I always have had such fondness for
34-year tenure — will be defined by what happens in the NCAA tournament. A stretch of four, five or maybe six games will be the difference between euphoria and dejection.
“There’s some teams we’re going to play that if they’re on their A-game, we couldn’t beat them in a million years,” the Hall of Fame coach said Tuesday. “We know that. I know that. But, we could get lucky.”
The Huskies, 24-2, including 12-0 in the AAC, aren’t leaving anything to chance. They’d like to use this road trip to prepare them for the condensed schedule they’ll see next month.
“We always look at these longer trips as just an opportunity, just as you would in the NCAA tournament,” Dailey said. “You have a quick turnaround, you don’t know the area, you might not know the team as well. … They’re two opponents we don’t know as well, and so I think that’s the way we look at it.”
The Huskies dropped 124 points on Wichita State last February in Hartford. They’re a perfect 8-for-8 against Tulsa, with each of those wins coming by double-digits.
Neither game is expected to be close, which pretty much spells how life has been for the Huskies in AAC play since 2013-14. They’re 98-0 during the regular season in conference play. They haven’t lost a conference game since the Big East Tournament final in 2012-13 to Notre Dame (61-59).
If all goes as planned, they’ll return home next week with another conference title in tow.
“I think part of being here, we focus on everything in chunks,” Samuelson said. “We want to get this taken care of. We know that, especially with the ups and downs this year, that anything can happen in any game. So, it is something that we want to make sure we take care of every single game. We … want no surprises, no things that could go wrong.”