HARTFORD, Conn. — Dan Hurley, his bout with COVID just about behind him, made it back to practice Saturday, and the looks on the faces he saw were enough to make a coach want to lift the mask over his eyes.
And the games that preceded it weren’t exactly eye candy, you may have heard.
“When I got back into practice, it looked like dogs in an animal shelter,” Hurley said. “These guys, they were beat up. It was a little scary going in there and seeing what the collective group looked like, their energy level.”
Five losses in six games did a lot of damage to this UConn men’s basketball team. There is time and enough opportunities to repair the mathematical damage to the season, but it was going to take creativity to restore the lost confidence.
It was bound to help, certainly, that UConn faced a struggling opponent, Butler, without its top rebounder, Manny Bates, at the sold-out and nearly filled XL Center on Sunday. Hurley and his staff pulled out all the motivational stops. The NCAA championship trophy, which is sent on a tour of schools perceived as having a chance to win it, stopped in Storrs so players could see and touch their goal and help Hurley drive home his most important point, that the last six games were the aberration, not the first 14.
“We know we don’t suck,” as he put it. “We know we’re really good and these next 10 games we’ve got a bunch of people coming to Gampel.”
Then the Huskies turned to Hollywood, with staffers Mat Johnson and Tevin Shears preparing a video that spliced scenes of the team’s five losses with clips from the movie “Any Given Sunday.” The 1999 Oliver Stone foray into football was rather forgettable, but Al Pacino, who shadowed Bill Parcells to prepare for the role, delivered an impassioned locker room speech that lives on stadium scoreboards coast to coast to this day. You’ve probably seen it. “The inches we need are al around us. ... On this team, we fight for that inch. ... Because when we add up all those inches, we know it’s going to make the [bleepin’] difference between winning and losing.”
Pure shmaltz, stilted, cliched. But the players, who weren’t born when it came out and have probably never seen Pacino’s more critically acclaimed performances, seemed to buy into it.
“I listened to it while I was brushing my teeth this morning,” said Jordan Hawkins, who scored 20 points in the Huskies’ 86-56 victory over Butler. “One thing that really stood out to me in that video was like, ‘we can heal as a team or die as individuals.’ So I think that’s the biggest message just being together.”
For 14 games, the Huskies were together and riding high, 14-0 and ranked as high as No. 2 in the national polls. Then came road losses at Xavier, Marquette, Providence and Seton Hall, blowing a 17-point lead in the last of those with Hurley absent on Wednesday, and an inexplicably dismal performance in a loss to St. John’s in Hartford on Jan. 15. Pacino’s rant begins with the words, “we’re in Hell now, gentlemen.” And despite this win, the Huskies could fall into the others-receiving-votes category, which, for a team with championship hopes represents purgatory, if not hell, itself.
So, inch-by-inch, possession by possession, the Huskies climbed out of hell at the XL Center, leading from wire to wire, outrebounding the Bulldogs 48-22. Back was the great ball movement, with 19 assists against eight turnovers, passing and driving and shooting with the conviction that had disappeared. Butler coach Thad Matta noticed the “tenacity” was back. The Huskies looked great in their 1990′s throwback uniforms, even if they needed only to throw it back a couple of weeks.
“It’s kind of a mix of both,” said freshman Alex Karaban, who scored 15, in explaining the sudden slide. “There were definitely X’s and O’s. We learned a lot from the St. John’s game on the defensive side. And confidence, too, came from playing in those hostile road games, we just had to learn to fight through them and stay together.”
Maybe the Huskies, speaking of Pacino, needed to get some scars on their faces. Those first 14 game were so easy, and after the last of them, a win over Villanova, Hurley himself scoffed at the idea of pressure attached to being undefeated. “Pressure is when you’re 6-8,” he said.
Now, he was saying that the pressure and the targets on the Huskies’ backs were very real, and no one handled it well.
“When you get back to where we took this team,” Hurley said, “where we were on the verge of being the No. 1 team in the country and had to settle for No. 2, there’s a certain pressure that comes with that and a mindset of, ‘you better continue to get better even when you’re at that level.’ And I think as a coaching staff we failed, I failed these guys in terms of trying to do things to take the pressure off them. The other failure was not forcing us to try to continue to improve, when it’s the first time you’ve been in a long time, even here. We didn’t handle the pressure well of being No. 2 in the country and getting everyone’s best shot.”
It was also pointed out, correctly, that nearly all major programs go through midseason stretches like this one. Kansas, the defending national champs and current No. 2, lost this week at Kansas State and to TCU at home by 23. There’s a lot of season left.
UConn (16-5, 5-5 in the Big East), at least for the moment, has some confidence back and some underdog’s edge. They face first-place Xavier, the team that started the downfall on New Year’s Eve, on Wednesday at Gampel, then play two of the league’s bottom teams, Georgetown and DePaul. They can put distance between themselves and the recent string of nightmares, quiet the negative noise and shift the narrative back to being one of the teams with the chance to touch that trophy again in April.
“Now, we’re in a much more comfortable spot with our backs against the wall,” Hurley said. “And I think we’re a little bit better when our backs are against the wall.”
