MILWAUKEE – The foot will not come off the gas for the UConn men’s basketball team after it was crowned the Big East regular-season champion on Sunday with two games to spare. Head coach Dan Hurley, who just three over weeks ago was irate with his team leading Georgetown by 25 with six minutes left, doesn’t plan on letting up now.
“We’ve got to find a way to finish this regular season off (by) going into these games like we haven’t won any games,” he said Tuesday.
Hurley thought back to 2018, his final season at Rhode Island, when his Rams clinched the Atlantic 10 regular-season title in similar fashion then lost their last two regular-season games. They reset and made it to the championship game in the conference tournament, where they lost to Davidson by one point, and then were ousted by Duke as a No. 7-seed in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
“Hopefully that experience will come in handy,” he said. “There’s a chance right now to go for 18 conference wins, which would be the most ever in the regular season, so there’s that. If you need externals, if you’re not competitive enough, then there’s some externals that you could find also.”
Hurley is competitive enough, without a doubt. The win-record, which he brought up on his own, adds some extra edge.
UConn (26-3, 16-2 Big East) will meet eighth-ranked Marquette (22-7, 13-5) on Wednesday in Milwaukee, with the Golden Eagles looking to hold off Creighton for the No. 2 seed in the Big East Tournament. It’ll be the fifth top-10 matchup for the Huskies (3-1) this season.
It was a top-five contest just over three weeks ago when then-No. 1 UConn blasted the fourth-ranked Golden Eagles in Hartford, 81-53. Since, Marquette lost its star point guard Tyler Kolek to an oblique injury and lost without him and center Oso Ighodaro (illness) at Creighton on Saturday, tightening the gap in the league standings.
Marquette, the league’s third-best team in terms of assist/turnover ratio (1.6), had just seven assists with as many turnovers without Kolek, the nation’s assist leader (7.6 per game).
Ighodaro is expected to be back for Wednesday’s rematch against the Huskies but Kolek will reportedly sit out the rest of the regular season and be re-evaluated before the conference tournament.
“(Kolek’s) such a unique player, there’s no one quite playing that position the way he plays that position,” Hurley said, noting that even without Kolek and Ighodaro, another unique player, Marquette had a chance to beat Creighton with about four minutes left. “It’s hard to play without obviously the preseason Player of the Year, as good as he is, but Kam Jones has been on a tear, … They’re still champions and have one of the best cultures in college sports.”
Jones, who Hurley called “one of the best rim finishers at the guard spot in the country,” has averaged 27 points over Marquette’s last four games, including back-to-back 34-point performances against Xavier and DePaul. The team’s leading scorer for the last two seasons, Jones led the way with 23 points against Creighton and forward David Joplin stepped up for an efficient 21.
The Huskies had 23 assists and only five turnovers in Sunday’s 30-point win over Seton Hall and are hoping to continue getting better, building momentum before the win-or-go-home games begin.
“This time of year you’re trying to find a balance of keeping your team fresh and getting enough reps, that way you feel sharp, and you play with a level of desperation in every game to win it,” Hurley said. “I personally feel like it’s important for me to put pressure on the team to win every game because we’re in that pressure point of year. … It’s not okay for us to not give our best performance. We’ve had a great, great year, we know the position we’re in and we want to keep achieving and playing to our identity.”
Hurley wants to build depth, but not if it means sacrificing possessions
Since the team got healthy, UConn has played a fairly tight, seven-man rotation with Jaylin Stewart and Solo Ball coming in as the eighth or ninth man for short stints on occasion. Stewart has played six minutes in each of the last three games and Ball even less, averaging just over three per game in that span.
With the regular season locked up and, in all likelihood, a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, Hurley wasn’t ready to commit to more playing time for the freshmen over these final two games.
“Obviously, J-Stew and Solo, having those guys confident and feeling like they could help us down the stretch here, postseason, is something that we talk about, wanting to get those guys more minutes and more opportunity. They’ve practiced well,” Hurley said.
But not if it takes away from UConn’s chance to win.
“We’re not gonna do anything that’s going to hurt our chances of winning the next possession,” he said. “We’d love to be playing deeper than we are right now; I guess we’ll see.”
What to know
Site: Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee
Time: 8:30 p.m.
Records: No. 2 UConn: 26-3 (16-2 Big East), No. 8 Marquette: 22-7 (13-5 Big East)
Series history: UConn leads, 9-8
Last meeting: Feb. 17, 2024 – No. 1 UConn 81, No. 4 Marquette 53 in Hartford
TV: FS1 – Jason Benetti, Bill Raftery
Radio: UConn Sports Network on 97.9 WUCS – Mike Crispino, Wayne Norman
Pregame reading:
- UConn men beat Seton Hall 91-61, clinch first outright Big East regular-season title in 25 years
- Dom Amore: For UConn men, it’s one crown down, a few more to go
- UConn men jump Purdue for No. 2 spot in AP top 25 poll; Castle ties Big East freshman record
- Stephon Castle has made his case; Could the UConn men win any other Big East awards?