UConn men’s preview:
Jalen Adams seeks return to NCAA Tournament in senior season.
STORRS — Barry Connors was sitting at Flanagan’s Restaurant down in Florida with his son, Quinn, watching UConn play Temple on the big-screen TV a couple of years back.
Temple led 63-62 with 8.4 seconds left, when Rodney Purvis inbounded the ball to Jalen Adams near midcourt. Quinn Connors, 11 at the time, had practically grown up with Adams, along with Kaleb Joseph, Andrew Chrabascz and other members of the two-time New Englandchampion Cushing Academy basketball team coached by his dad. Quinn knew what was going to happen next. He had seen it all too many times before.
“Look dad,” Quinn said to his father, “Jalen’s gonna win the game for them.”
Sure enough, Adams took the inbounds pass, drove the lane and hit a left-handed layup with 2.8 seconds left that clinched the Huskies’ 64-63 victory.
About a year earlier, Jason Smith, who coached Adams for one postgrad season at Brewster Academy, was watching UConn’s AAC tournament battle with Cincinnati. Adams had led Brewster to both New England and national prep championships in 2015, so Smith knew he had it in him to make big shots. Even 75-foot shots.
Cincinnati’s Kevin Johnson hit a 3-pointer to give the Bearcats a three-point lead with 0.8 seconds left in the third overtime, and Adams and Daniel Hamilton were arguing about who should inbound the ball.
“I was like, ‘Don’t let Jalen take the ball inbounds! He’s gonna make something happen,’ ” Smith recalled. “He wants the ball in the clutch moment.”
Sure enough, Hamilton inbounded to Adams and … well, you know the rest — a 75-footer to send the game to a fourth OT, where UConn eventually won.
Those are probably the two most memorable shots of Jalen Adams’ first three years at UConn. He was inconsistent and largely overshadowed by Hamilton, Purvis and others as a freshman and, quite frankly, the Huskies just haven’t had many big games the past two seasons.
Now Adams is a senior, with one last chance to truly make his mark at UConn. He’s been a first-team all-conference pick the past two seasons and is a preseason pick again this year. He’s on the verge of cracking UConn’s all-time top-10 scoring list, and if he plays well enough, could be in the running for league player of the year and even All-American.
He’s also struggling to be a leader on a team that desperately needs it. Adams was held out of a recent closed-door scrimmage against Harvard due to a violation of team rules, and didn’t start in UConn’s exhibition game win over Southern Connecticut State on Friday night.
First-year UConn coach Dan Hurley had said Adams would be a game-time decision for that one, and wound up popping off the bench about 71⁄ minutes into the contest, scoring 16 points. Hurley had had a meeting earlier in the week with his star guard to lay out what he expects from him
“I wouldn’t be doing my job, when you’ve got his ability, if I didn’t hold him to the absolute highest possible standard every single day,” the coach said after Friday night’s game. “My responsi-
bility as a coach is to do that with him, or else I’m cheating him every day with my job. This is a talented guy, a likeable guy, a guy that could be one of the best guards in the country. He’s got NBA talent. From here on forward, we’re accepting nothing less than him performing day-in and day-out like great players do.
Adams agreed.
“I’ve just got to do the right thing and fall in love with the process,” he said. “There are no shortcuts to success, so I’ve got to buy in 100 percent to the coaching staff’s game plan, and I’m sure things will work out for me.”
Thus far, Adams’s legacy at UConn is a 75-foot shot. He wants more. He wants to get back to the NCAA tournament.
“I really just want our team to experience what it’s like to get to the postseason and to continue to play in March,” he said recently. “That’s when the excitement’s happening and everyone’s watching. That’s really when the dreams do come true. I really want our team to get that experience. We really work so hard during the summer, don’t take many days off. It would be really great for our team to get that experience.”
It’s hardly out of the question. Hurley has made a habit of turning around college programs. He brings a no-nonsense attitude that should be good for a team that had developed bad habits the past couple of years — and especially good for Adams.
“Coach Hurley is exactly what Jalen needs his senior year,” said Smith. “As a prep player, in AAU, at Cushing and Brewster, Jalen’s so talented, I think at times it was too easy for him. I think what you’re gonna see this year as a senior with Danny, he’s gonna be that tough S.O.B. that Jalen needs. He’ll understand, ‘This is my last go-round, I’m gonna take this team to the tournament.’
“I think you’ll see him have a monster season.”
STRUGGLING TO BECOME A LEADER
For Hurley to turn around a program that’s lost 35 games the past two seasons and has fallen off the national radar, he needs help from his best player. He wants — needs — Adams to be a leader, on and off the floor. Needs him to challenge his teammates at times, be more of a … jerk (though Hurley uses a more colorful term).
“He’s got to understand he’s not running for UConn class president,” Hurley said.
For much of Hurley’s first seven months on the job, Adams has delivered. Then came some sort of infraction — it’s not clear what Adams did or didn’t do — to warrant his recent punishment.
“I have really high standards,” Hurley said. “You can’t give me three great weeks, then a bad day or two. You’ve got to show up every day. And it’s even more important when you’re the best player on the team. The best player and the coach set the tone for the program. He’s got to be bought-in for every aspect of the program, not just from 12:45 to 3:15 p.m. on the practice floor.”
It’s not the first time Adams has slipped up at UConn. As a freshman, in a game at — ironically — Temple, Adams got in a verbal altercation with coach Kevin Ollie at halftime and spent most of the latter half tethered to the bench. He finally re-entered the game with a few minutes left, but the Owls had already rallied back from a 12-point deficit to win by five.
On the eve of the 2017-18 season, Adams was issued a summons after getting into a minor scooter accident on campus and was suspended for the Huskies’ season-opener against Colgate.
Neither were capital crimes, but both revealed a level of immaturity. Being a leader is somewhat new territory for Adams. At Cushing, it was Joseph, who played at Syracuse and is now at Creighton, Chrabascz, who starred at Butler, and Idris Taqqee, a three-time captain at St. Bonaventure, that provided the leadership.
“Jalen didn’t really need to do that,” Connors recalled. “We weren’t really asking him to be a leader, and he didn’t have to be.”
One trait Adams did own at the prep level, however, was winning: three New England championships and a national title. He had the clutch gene, too.
“I can’t tell you how many gamewinning shots he hit,” Connors said.
“If the kid was playing tiddledywinks and he was down one wink, he’d throw it off the glass and it would go in,” Connors joked. “That’s just the way he is. He’s not afraid of anything. He was better in our big games.”
This season, Adams is clearly the best player on his team. Now, he’s got to embrace that role and all the responsibility that comes with it.
“It’s great to be the best player, because you get all the attention,” Hurley noted. “But you get held to a higher standard, because everyone’s watching you. If I allow the best player on the team to cut corners and do the things he wants to do, we’re gonna have a soft, weak, losing team.”
And that’s not the kind of legacy Jalen Adams wants to leave at UConn.