GLENDALE, Ariz. – Now the Connecticut Huskies belong to history, and the legendary champions of the past who must make a space.
Move over, Florida. You’re no longer the last repeat winner. They are.
Move over, UCLA and North Carolina. You were the gold standard for dominant rolls through March. But look at what they just did.
Move over Kentucky. You’re no longer the only No. 1 ranked team in more than two decades to run the table in the tournament. They’re with you.
Move over nearly everyone. Only UCLA and Kentucky now have more titles than Connecticut’s six, and only North Carolina has as many. And the Huskies’ half-dozen have all come in a dizzying parade of trophies. It took Kentucky 49 tournaments to go from its first championship to its sixth. It took North Carolina 61. It’s taken Connecticut 25 — a gusher of titles that only UCLA can match.
“For the past 25 or 30 years,” Dan Hurley said Monday night when they handed him the championship trophy, “UConn’s been running college basketball.”
Facing the most fearsome player in the land from Purdue, nothing had changed for Connecticut. The Huskies took the lead like they always do. They controlled the second half like they always do. They won by double digits like they always do. The 75-60 win over the Boilermakers completed a truly remarkable two-year Connecticut show of force. All 12 NCAA tournament games were won by double digits. In the last 10, they never trailed in the second half. They were behind at 1:36 Monday night. That made a total of 6:22 for the entire 2024 tournament.
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They won the Big East season title. Won the league tournament. They began March on a rampage and never stopped. “We wanted to give everything,” Hurley said, “so we could win absolutely everything.” The average winning margin of 23.3 points is the highest on record since the field went to 64 teams in 1985, passing North Carolina’s 2009 record. It was just behind UCLA in 1967, back when the Bruins needed only four games to win the title. What must it be like, to blow through the NCAA tournament like that?
“I think it makes the end of the games easier when you don’t have to shoot free throws or get a bucket to seal the deal,” said Cam Spencer, who transferred from Rutgers to Connecticut to have a chance at this very moment, the lone portal addition in this wave. “We just played every possession like it was our last one.
“I think we had a lot of guys who didn’t want to lose tonight. It’s the best feeling of my life.”
Hurley had long said it plainly about his team: “If we play elite offense, elite defense and beat you on the backboard, we’re tough to beat.”
Or lately, impossible. Monday night was Exhibit A. Balanced offense with four in double figures, led by Tristen Newton’s 20. Sound execution with 48 percent shooting and only eight turnovers. Muscle on the boards with a 35-28 edge in rebounding, only the fourth time this season Purdue has been bettered in that department.
And defense. Lots and lots of defense. You say Zach Edey scored 37 points, the most in a national championship in 46 years? Swell. The Huskies didn’t care. “We were willing to single it up (on Edey),” Hurley said. “The games that they’ve lost this year they didn’t get the production from Loyer, Jones, Smith and Gillis. We wanted to take those four guys out. If Zach went for 48 and those other guys didn’t score they didn’t have a chance to win.”
So Edey got his 37. Fletcher Loyer, Lance Jones, Braden Smith and Mason Gillis went a combined 6-for-22 for only 17 points. The Boilermakers had one 3-pointer. One. That’s the fewest in a title game in 13 years. They only took seven attempts.
Offense, defense, rebounding. Connecticut.
“What you see is what you get,” the Huskies’ senior guard said. “Old school.”
Andrew Hurley, the coach’s son.
Even the victims could see that.
“To win the national championship, then to be back in this position, I think there’s a lot of things that come with ultimate success that’s hard to do, what they’ve been able to do,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “Everybody defends on that team. You’re not allowed to play if you can’t guard. It’s one of those deals, like old school.”
There’s that phrase again. This has been a mission painstakingly planned for and mercilessly executed. Hurley studied repeat champions of the recent past. He was on the phone with Billy Donovan — Florida’s coach for its titles in 2006-07 — a week after the Huskies’ championship run last April. He knew his team was different.
“I kind of hit that emotional crash when it’s over and it doesn’t feel like maybe what you thought it would in terms of that sustained euphoria. Kind of disappeared quickly. We talked a lot about that, just the emotions of it all. Then the mindset with the team,” Hurley said. “The difference is, I had a whole new team basically. Coach K (Duke’s repeaters in 1991-92) and Billy Donovan, the last two coaches to do it, returned pretty much intact, an entire dominant team. We’ve done this while losing five of our top seven scorers (actually five of eight) and only taking one in the portal. So doing it through player development, through trusting freshmen, strategic portal, it was different.”
“We did talk about defending (the championship) more than I was told to. That was probably what we leaned into a lot with that returning core that could have been complacent because ‘been there, done that.’ Final Four, national championships, I did it already, why do I got to push so hard? You got a chance to make history at a place that’s impossible to make history.”
“To me, it is more impressive than what Florida and Duke did because they brought back their entire teams.”
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There might be a family debate over that because the Hurley clan now has two repeat champions. Brother Bobby did it in 1991-92 as a Duke guard.
The Huskies finished the job Monday night relentlessly squeezing hope and life from a Purdue team not eager to let go of either. UConn went for the jugular in the way it has for two tournaments in a row. Inexorable, unrelenting, almost ruthless. From where does such a single-minded purpose come? Hurley mentioned the way Connecticut does things when he gathers its talent.
“We just haven’t changed a lot. Like, we don’t kiss the kids’ ass during recruiting. We don’t kiss it while they’re on campus. We bring tremendous value to our players because we’re old school and we push ’em to get better and to become better people. We teach ’em how to become successful.
“I think we try to play modern basketball with the use of analytics. I bought more into that. But have really held on to old-school values the way coaches may be used to be more, where we’re in charge and we hold people accountable.”
The historic results have been enjoyed especially by those who came before. In the post-game celebration on the State Farm Stadium court Monday night, shaking hands, hugging and snapping pictures amid all the confetti, were several faces from earlier Connecticut glory. The guys who started this freight train.
Rip Hamilton, for instance, was the Most Outstanding Player in the 1999 Final Four. The arc goes from him and his teammates to Monday night, when it was Newton’s turn to be the MOP. Newton wasn’t born yet when Hamilton and his mates took the first title.
“When I first got to Connecticut my goal was to win a championship for all the guys who came before me who built the program up but were never able to win a championship,” Hamilton said. “So we won one, it was like we won it for you all. Now to get there six times, be 6-0 while doing it, it’s a blessing.
“I reached out to Joakim Noah (Florida’s star for its repeat titles) and I said give me some advice I can give to the kids. He said to stay locked in, don’t get caught up on guys going to the NBA, don’t get caught up on what’s next, but be locked in on the moment. And I think they all were.”
There was also Jim Calhoun, the coach who started all this with three of the first six championships and has been a constant presence for Dan Hurley. “In tough times he’s supported me and in good times he’s kept me level-headed,” Hurley said.
Calhoun is 81 now and can look back on a golden era that he began. “Dave Gavitt, my mentor, once said to me the greatest test of a man’s ability and accomplishment is time, and if you can build something that’s going to stand the test of time. The guys you look at right there, what Danny’s done, we stood the test of time. And we’re not going any place.”
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It has been left to Hurley, the former history high school teacher, to keep the good times going. He said he once had to teach sex education to a co-ed class. That taught him how to control a classroom and keep an audience focused. He has used that perspective to keep a team together and on task in an age of outside forces pulling locker rooms apart, from NIL to the transfer portal.
“The resources that the University of Connecticut and programs now invest in these players are not for their attendance. It’s not just to be on campus. It’s to produce and to produce winning,” he said. “The way we travel, the residence, the full-service dining we have in our $40 million plus practice facility, the NIL opportunities. I coach the hell out of these guys because of everything that they get. And they have a responsibility to work harder and to represent UConn and to fight their absolute ass off to win games for our donors, our fans, and the university because of everything that they get, that past players didn’t get.”
On such solid ground, the Connecticut Huskies made more history Monday night.
It never seems to end. Donovan Clingan, the 7-foot-2 center who literally went eyeball-to-eyeball with Edey, was asked the other day to name his all-time UConn five.
Clearly someone attuned to the legacy of his school, he quickly reeled off Ray Allen from the 1990s, Hamilton, Emeka Okafor from 2004, Kemba Walker from 2011 and Shabazz Napier from 2014. Except for Allen, national champions all.
“It’s hard,” he decided. “I just don’t know how you beat last year’s starting five. There’s a lot of legends at Connecticut.”
And more all the time. The powerhouse whose only problems this week in Arizona were plane trouble and weather that had them landing in the middle of the night, would be heading back soon for yet another victory parade. Dan Hurley’s feeling about that?
“I hope the flight’s not delayed.”
