The Big East will provide challenges, knock the Huskies down and force them to get back and heal. It's the experience that made them champs last year.
STORRS — Maybe it was just getting a little too comfortable for the UConn men’s basketball team. There was bound to be a knock down, a bruise, something that will leave a mark, and with all that comes the chance for the Huskies to prove they have perhaps the most important trait of a champion: the ability to get back up and heal.
“We have a very high level of trust, knowing how last year’s story ended,” coach Dan Hurley said, “after we went through … some not great performances in January.”
It will be a theme of any book to be written on the 2023 NCAA champs: The way the Huskies started out 14-0, then staggered though a 2-6 stretch starting New Year’s Eve, then raced to the finish with 15 wins in 17 games.
“We learned a lot from January last year, when we struggled for quite some time,” Hurley said. “We dealt with a lot of internal frustration, a lot of external noise. We don’t handle losing well here. Internally, we suffer when it happens because it’s personal to all of us, it’s very important.”
So beware the Ides of January and February. No need to worry about the Ides of March. If they’re still playing on March 15, the Huskies, who play St. John’s at the XL Center Saturday night, will be doing all right.
The 75-60 loss at Seton Hall on Wednesday night exposed a few weaknesses that were not apparent during the Huskies’ 10-1 romp through the nonconference schedule, which included five quality wins and a one-possession loss at Kansas.
Conference play, especially on the road, is a different deal, most particularly in the Big East, where the three best teams lost their first conference games. The more time passes, the more one should marvel at what Jim Calhoun’s Huskies did in the original Big East in the 1990s, including a three-season run of 49-5 between 1993 and ’96, and 31-5 between 1997-99. Even in the new Big East, without Syracuse, Louisville, Pitt, et al, that kind of dominance seems unfathomable today.
UConn’s last three national champions had their struggles in conference play, going 9-9 in the old Big East in 2011; 12-6 with three losses to Louisville in the American in 2013-14; and finished 13-7 last season. These teams actually redeemed themselves in the NCAA Tournament.
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— UConn Men's Basketball (@UConnMBB) December 20, 2023
That’s how treacherous a gauntlet conference play is in a power basketball conference. It’s no accident that teams that steamroll through lesser conferences may get a good tournament seed, but don’t often fare well in March.
UConn’s experiences of last January became part of the what it became two months later. Without that 2-6 stretch, there may not have been the six straight double-digit wins in March.
One of those six losses came at Seton Hall, in which the Huskies blew a lead. Andre Jackson threw a fit in the locker room after the game, and it proved cathartic for the team.
Jackson is now in the NBA, so who does that now? The short answer is no one, because Jackson’s brand of leadership, Shabazz Napier’s brand, doesn’t come along often.
“Hopefully, we don’t have too many situations where that has to happen,” said Tristen Newton, who had been playing like an All-American before falling off his game at Seton Hall.
“We need more of what Andre did last year,” Alex Karaban said. “None of us can do what Andre did last year, we’ve just got to find our own ways to do it. We’re all trying to use our voices right now.”
Hurley played the “leadership card” a few times Wednesday, and again Friday, as if to issue a challenge to Newton, Donovan Clingan, Karaban, or perhaps someone else, like Cam Spencer, who has the combustible personality of the group.
“I don’t know that we’ve seen that yet and that’s probably a little bit of a concern,” Hurley said. “Who’s going to be that emotional leader of this team? Who wants that responsibility? That was one of the question marks coming into the season, the depth and the leadership. It was clear that it wasn’t there the other night. It’s easy to lead when you’re playing great and you look like the best team in the country. It’s hard to lead when the wheels come off and you’re in full meltdown mode.
“Whether it’s Tristen’s personality or not, whether it’s Alex’s personality or not, whether it’s Donovan’s personality or not, these guys have got to step up and lead this team the way Andre, Adama (Sanogo) and Jordan (Hawkins) did.”
UConn lost important players from its championship team: Jackson, Sanogo, Hawkins, Joey Calcaterra and Naheim Alleyne, who will face his former teammates on Saturday after going through the transfer portal to St. John’s. For two months, it looked like Spencer and the incoming freshmen could pick up all that slack, and it looked like Clingan, backed by Samson Johnson, could hold down the center position nearly as well as Sanogo, backed by Clingan.
A day after Jim Boeheim was calling UConn the best team in the country, Seton Hall blew up a lot of assumptions, taking it right to the Huskies and making them look soft.
“It’s a different experience,” Hurley said. “If a first-round NCAA Tournament game gets refereed in that same way, I don’t know if anyone from that crew is going to do the next game. This is what happens in conference play. There is extra physicality that’s allowed, and it’s a different type of game that we were not ready for. We got punched in the mouth and we should have learned our lesson as a staff from last year and had the players better prepared for that.”
In March, it’s survive and advance. In January, it’s learning survival skills by, on given nights, failing to survive. There is a reason no champ has repeated since Florida in 2007 — it’s damn hard. There is no doubt, after what we saw in the nonconference, that this UConn team has the ability to make that breakthrough, but probably won’t do it without accumulating more scar tissue.
The cuts and bruises are a necessary part of the process, and in a league in which three ranked teams: No. 5 UConn, No. 6 Marquette and No. 12 Creighton all lost conference openers, that won 68.3 percent of its out-of-conference games, the cuts, bruises and knockdowns are inevitable.
It’s how the Huskies get back up and heal from nights like Wednesday that will determine the ending.