Blowing smoke
UConn’s national championship platform wasn’t dismantled with loss at Creighton
The UConn men’s basketball team’s loss Tuesday at Creighton was a disaster at both ends of the court and, in a way, part of the sport’s beauty.
What fun would basketball be if built on absolutes? April coronations are recognition for what’s accomplished during March Madness, not for how fancy a team can tap dance through December-January-February.
And, surely, the Huskies had danced of late, all the right moves for 14 consecutive victories over 56 days, including a blowout of No. 4 Marquette at the XL Center on Saturday that led to a unanimous No. 1 ranking and thoughts of this being an historically great team — which it still can be.
But just three days after that Hartford party, UConn was dismantled. Its own uninspired performance — players didn’t play well and coaches didn’t coach well, as Dan Hurley said — collided with the fury of an efficient and energetic host in front of a wild crowd that ended up storming the court.
Creighton couldn’t have played much better. UConn couldn’t have played much worse. And the result, of course, was sobering. The final score was 85-66. UConn put together an early spurt to lead by eight, and a late one to pull within 10, but this game was essentially a two-hour horror show on both offense and defense.
Does it matter? Of course. Every game matters. UConn hasn’t yet clinched the Big East regular season title or a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed, for instance.
Does it matter much in actually gauging a team’s potential? No.
Maybe it even helps in the long run.
Get blown out like UConn did Tuesday and it will turn some
heads and pop open some eyes, sow seeds of doubt, particularly because UConn had avoided crashing and burning like all teams do a few times a year, for so long. It can also make Hurley’s constant demands for hyper-focused attention on what’s next instead of what’s past come off as more genuine and less manufactured. UConn headed home Tuesday night into Wednesday morning having seen the glare of warning lights and that’s not a bad thing.
A loss like this, in these circumstances and in Omaha (as always) is going to be punishment for the success that preceded it. Hurley was a guest of Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter Monday night, one of those can-you-believe-how-wellthis-is-going conversations that fit perfectly into a conversation for a national audience as the Huskies had created a great national divide.
It was the Huskies, then a fault line, and then 362 other Division I NCAA teams. UConn was all the rage when the ball went up in the CHI Health Center, and then that celebrated team got clobbered by the No. 15 Bluejays.
Any loss to an uppertier Big East team on the road is nothing to be ashamed of, though the way it played out was unexpected. UConn was uncharacteristically slow in the way it defended, or tried to. Creighton made 14 of 28 3-pointers, and they were desperate attempts as the shot clock expired. There were so many wideopen looks. Offensively, the movement with and without the ball that has defined so many January and February victories was absent.
The Huskies looked gassed, and maybe they were. UConn was playing its fourth game in 10 days and dragging the weight of its accomplishments, its winning streak, its attention, its perceived invulnerability. It’s not easy moving along this path without a slip-up. That’s all gone now, weight out of the backpack that the Huskies will wear toward March and into the postseason.
No team is more capable of attaining all its goals. That remains the case. As soon as the party from the 2023 national title started to calm a bit, the focus for UConn became about creating the rare scenario where a defending champion actually makes something memorable of its season.
Since Florida repeated as champions in 2006-07, no team has made it past the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament. UConn (24-3, 14-2 Big East) has a body of work that screams Phoenix, didn’t look like a Final Four team on Tuesday, but its body of work screams Phoenix. A platform has been built and it wasn’t deconstructed on Tuesday, when UConn took one on the chin like all teams do from time to time. Even some of the best. Heck, if Kevin Ollie’s 2013-14 UConn team played Louisville 30 times that season, it probably would have finished 0-30. The Huskies lost to Rick Pitino’s Cardinals by 12 at home in January, by 33 on the road to close the regular season and by 10 in the American Athletic Conference championship game in Memphis. Weeks later, Shabazz Napier was strutted around on the raised court in Texas, stretching the front of his jersey for everyone to read UCONN as the national championship celebration began.
Should UConn win the national championship? They remain as well equipped, even more so, than any other team. The fact that a little temporary doubt was cast in Nebraska only was a healthy reminder that anything can happen in March. The Huskies were never going to get a trophy for what they did in the weeks that followed New Year’s. They’ll have to earn that over the next six weeks or so. That they weren’t any good on Tuesday didn’t diminish the odds.
Few will think much about Creighton or Omaha or Feb. 20 until or unless UConn matches up with the Bluejays again in the Big East Tournament or NCAA Tournament. ESPN’s College GameDay is coming to Gampel Pavilion Saturday morning. Villanova enters the building Saturday night. This potentially historic season rolls on, the vibe only briefly disrupted.