Another excruciating loss for Huskies
PHILADELPHIA — UConn’s day started with a fire alarm that evacuated its downtown hotel at 4:30 a.m.
It ended around 2 p.m. with another alarming loss, the type of excruciating setback that coach Dan Hurley has said numerous times comes with the territory of the second year of a rebuild.
The Huskies outplayed 14th-ranked Villanova for most of the second half on Saturday, led by six midway through and by four with five minutes to play. But the Wildcats fought back, geared by a sequence in the final minute that symbolized much of the game — a UConn turnover and a Villanova 3-pointer — and held on for a 61-55 victory at Wells Fargo Center.
When it was over, there were the all-too familiar promises from Hurley that things will get better, that UConn is on the precipice of turning this thing around.
“People better get us now,” the second-year UConn coach said. “That’s all. They better get us now. Because it’s coming.”
But the fight to remain positive amidst the excruciating losses — the doubleovertime losses to Xavier and Wichita State, the three-point loss to Indiana, now this — remains real.
“It’s a frustrated locker room,” said Hurley, “because that game was on the table for us.”
“We had them on their heels the whole game,” added freshman forward Akok Akok.
Maybe all you had to see was Akok’s reaction when asked how close the Huskies seem to be to winning these types of games.
“We thought we had the game,” he said, then closed
his eyes, raised his head toward the sky and took a deep breath.
Finally opening his eyes again, he simply added: “We’ve just got to keep the lead and win the game.”
UConn (10-7) trailed by six at halftime, but hit 10 of its first 12 shots in the latter half to take as much as a 41-35 lead.
But every time UConn garnered some momentum, it seemed Villanova (14-3) would thwart it with a 3-pointer. Mostly by Jermaine Samuels (19 points) and Collin Gillespie (12).
With the Huskies trailing by a point, UConn point guard Alterique Gilbert committed a turnover with just over a minute left, trying a no-look pass in the corner to Akok.
“Bad decision. I made a bad play,” Gilbert, a fourthyear junior, confessed. “Obviously, that was a tough play for us. I’ll learn from it.”
Added Hurley: “(Villanova was) kind of scrambling. There were a couple of guys that potentially could have gotten a quick, easy score there. Right at the moment you want to go timeout, Al just kind of fired it. I think that’s a little bit of where we’re at right now. We’re much-improved, we’re really close. Good teams like Houston, Villanova, Wichita State — they don’t make those types of passes. They’re just a lot more solid at that point in the game.”
Samuels countered with the game’s biggest dagger, a trey that put Villanova up 57-53. Christian Vital hit a lane runner, but ‘Nova hit four straight foul shots over the final 19.7 seconds to seal the victory.
Villanova hit 11 of 23 3-pointers. UConn made just 2 of 15. The Huskies also turned the ball over 17 times.
“Their 3-point shooting and our 17 turnovers were killers,” Hurley noted.
Last week, UConn lost leading 3-point shooter Tyler Polley for the season with a torn ACL in his left knee.
“That’s a problem,” Hurley noted. “Losing Tyler hurt us in a number of ways. Obviously, 3-point shooting is the biggest.”
Villanova sweeps the three-game series between the former (and future) Big
East rivals. The Wildcats won the first two meetings by a combined total of 43 points the prior two seasons.
“We talked about earning their respect early in the game, because they don’t respect us, because the last two times they saw us we were a soft team,” Hurley said. “And a bad team. We wanted to establish their respect early, which we did, then have a chance to win the game late, which is exactly where we wanted to be.”
UConn will play Villanova twice next season, and moving forward, as it returns to the Big East. For now, there are familiar refrains, and Akok Akok looking up to the sky, trying to convey how tough it is to keep coming close, but falling short. Again.
RIM RATTLINGS
1 The entire UConn team had to evacuate their downtown hotel at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday after a fire alarm was pulled. It’s not the first time this has happened to the Huskies: prior to last season’s loss to Villanova at Madison Square Garden, a late-night fire alarm caused the team to evacuate their Manhattan hotel.
1 Carlton was a force inside for good stretches of the game and finished with 12 points before fouling out. The 6-foot-10 junior got a haircut a few days earlier.
“It was kind of blocking my vision, I couldn’t see much,” he said, with a smile. “I had to cut it.
Did the haircut help improve his play?
“Maybe a little bit. I got a little faster.”