Champion Huskies look hungry for more
As the second half turned into a blowout and their lead ballooned toward 30 points, UConn’s players surrendered nothing, not as they continued to dive for loose balls or fight for rebounds at td garden, not as they watched the last players on the bench rip off their warm-ups and get some coveted playing time, not as they waited out the final few seconds of a dominating sweet 16 victory that left last year’s championship game opponent breathless and soaked in exhaustion.
Only when the final pass of the night landed in Andrew hurley’s hands did the huskies’ coach allow himself to let go, with dan hurley finally content his players needed no more instruction, relieved his mounting pile of superstitions had been fulfilled in the form of his senior walk-on son dribbling out the clock on yet another victory.
“With about 13 seconds left i allowed myself to enjoy it, as i screamed to get the ball to Andrew,” the coach said after his team advanced to a second straight Elite Eight with its knockout of san diego state. “i’m just so maniacal about the next possession. i can’t help but coach until the very end.”
his players play until that end, too, building a team that somehow, against all odds and every ounce of conventional sports wisdom, looks hungrier than it did a year ago. Of all the victories hurley and his huskies have compiled this season — thursday night’s no. 34 at td garden matched a school record — they just keep getting more impressive. if NCAA tournament games are designed to get more difficult as they go along, UConn, with its unmatched depth, unrivaled length, and incomparable talent, is looking less
like simply the No. 1 overall seed and more like an overwhelming favorite to win a second straight national title.
They can all but taste it. “Hungry is a great word to describe us,” Alex Karaban said in the celebratory postgame locker room. “The veteran guys, we’re hungry because we want to experience what we did last year and experience that feeling again. At the same time, the vets want the new guys to experience that too, and the new guys are hungry.
“We have five freshmen on the team — this is their first year of college basketball and they’re just excited to be on this journey for the first time. And we have [senior] cam [Spencer], who’s never played in march madness and his mind-set is always basketball first. And we also play for the hungriest coach in college basketball. He sets the example every day. It could be the smallest thing he thinks about and he turns it into motivation for us. It always starts with coach.”
What Hurley has managed to instill in his players during this rocky time in college basketball, when the transfer portal has brought free agency to the game, when NBA riches are still there beckoning the best of the talented lot, when NIL money has to be managed and egos can grow so big so fast, is a testament to that hunger.
It’s a testament to the coach’s ability to get his players to understand the experience and memory of winning a title together will always outlast the fleeting satisfaction of an individual goal.
But preaching hunger is one thing, maintaining it is another. How does Uconn keep it going?
It’s in players like Spencer, the graduate senior guard who knows he is in his last college goaround, the floppy-haired, hard playing point guard whose previous stops at Loyola and Rutgers never did deliver him to march. It’s Spencer leading Uconn with 18 points (15 in the first half ), willing the Huskies on their sprint across the second half, when they turned a 40-31 lead at the break into a 30-point laugher.
“He knows this is his last chance,” Karaban said. “He’s the craziest person I know about basketball. He’s extremely hungry. This is his last chance and he doesn’t want to mess it up or leave any regrets out there.”
It’s in players like Stephon castle, the freshman addition who arrived with so much hoopla and had to fight his way through injury and the adjustment to college, finding his footing in this second half of the season and whetting the appetite of NBA scouts everywhere, but who can’t think of wanting anything more than what his teammates experienced a year ago.
“I see it every day in practice. Even after they won it last year, they came in every day in the summer and worked super hard like they hadn’t won anything,” castle said. “It hasn’t been a surprise for me at all. We just have guys that want to win. They feel like they don’t have enough success yet and are striving for more.”
It’s in a coach who isn’t afraid to talk about it all, to let his players know every day how much he believes they can do this again, to use words such as legacy and history on a campus where five national championships already set quite a high bar.
“We just have people that just are desperate to win more,” Hurley said. “We have winners. We have ‘we’ guys. We have also talked about legacy. You’re talking Tristen Newton right now, you can make a case for the greatest career that any guard has ever had while wearing a uniform at Uconn while he’s at Uconn. What he’s accomplished in two years. Or Donovan clingan.
“These guys right now are leaving a legacy in a place that’s hard to leave a legacy. It’s been a historical season in a tough place to make history. They’re galvanized by that. It’s special.”