Dan Hurley's UConn Teams Have Done The Impossible To March Madness: Make It Predictable
UConn knew it would win the national championship. You knew UConn would win the national championship. And deep down, Matt Painter and Purdue knew it too.
Purdue was the best the sport had left to muster, one final, desperate gasp before UConn swallowed the tournament whole and belched out the bracket’s skeleton, licking its fingers as meaningless minutes of a hopelessly heralded national championship sulked away in embarrassment.
For the second consecutive year, Dan Hurley’s resolute bunch air-dried a perfect postseason that perennially oozes upsets. The Huskies smacked each successive opponent with the same velocity, playing at a rhythm that exhausted the fittest athletes and deploying a game plan that confounded the savviest coaches. Hurley spoke with an assuredness that the chasm between UConn and the 67 others was vast. If he was wrong, he risked sounding arrogant. Naïve. Incredulous.
He wasn’t wrong.
This mighty clash between Purdue and UConn was marketed as urban warfare, two skyscrapers in 7-foot-4 Zach Edey and 7-foot-2 Donovan Clingan edging for limited acreage under the rim. It was presented as a graceful respite from the yawners of title bouts past. No streaky luck involved. Top talent on display on the biggest stage.
The game lived up to its billing, at least in the first 10 minutes. Cam Spencer, the Rutgers transfer who cuts like the blade of a sushi chef, found his spots and scored 7 points on his first three attempts. Edey had his bullying way and poured in 11 early. It was back and forth for a bit. A nice tease. Then the UConn cadence, slackening the game’s tension by overwhelming its opponent, took hold.
Edey had spent his college career conditioning his gargantuan frame for a full 40 minutes and mechanically engineering his hook shot to fall through the net with geometric precision. And yet it wasn’t long before the back-to-back Naismith Award winner was breathing heavily as Tristen Newton scooted by him on layups. Edey’s close-range shots started uncharacteristically clinging and clanging, increasingly pressured by the future NBA lottery pick they call Cling Kong.
Purdue, typically lethal from long-range, attempted only two 3-pointers by halftime. The Huskies led by 6.
It might as well have been 60.
Nothing could shake UConn’s poise. Not foul trouble. Not an otherworldly putback dunk from Purdue’s Camden Heide. Not Hurley lunging on the court to physically nudge Spencer when he was dribbling the ball (a sign, perhaps, that the coach was so at ease in the waning moments he tricked himself into thinking he was managing a scrimmage).
Purdue couldn’t do what Virginia had in 2019, avenging a 16-seeded pantsing with a national championship the following year. But then again, there was no storyline on the planet that could have upended the narrative that was so clearly laid bare in the Huskies’ jaunt to college basketball supremacy. Stetson, Northwestern, San Diego State, Illinois and Alabama were mere steps on the Werner ladder. Purdue was the worn net, a sitting duck against the fresh pair of scissors that was UConn.
After diminishing a drama-laden three weekends into an inevitability in 2023 and now ‘24, Hurley has joined elite status in the coaching ranks. His timing couldn’t be better. As luminaries of the sport — Krzyzewski, Boeheim, Williams— have peeled away in recent years, and the gap of time expands since hangers-on like Tom Izzo, Rick Pitino and John Calipari (now at Arkansas) were kingmakers, Hurley in short order has become the face of men’s college basketball.
Despite last season’s dream ending, the bespectacled madman who’d grown up in the shadow of his repeat champion brother and high school coaching stalwart father had something to prove this year. The Huskies had reached the mountaintop with Jim Calhoun and Kevin Ollie. The onus was on Hurley to prove there wasn’t just something in the water in Storrs. (There might be. But Hurley is still one hell of a filtration system.)
No one can doubt that, in an era where coaches must contend not only with recruiting and coaching but also NIL and the transfer portal — not to mention preparing kids to play in the pros — Hurley has built a significant competitive advantage among his peers in the Big East and beyond. He minimizes the effort involved with his trite phrasing — bringing a group of unselfish, uber-talented guys who want to win to one campus — but also acknowledges that none of this is easy. Even if UConn made it look that way.
On stage, after a win everyone saw coming, Newton tried to answer what it felt like to hold the trophy in two straight years and be honored as the most impactful baller on the floor in both. He appeared nonplussed, as if there was any scenario where he’d find himself couch-bound or despondent in a locker room on this Monday night. Hurley too regarded this season’s coda with an almost willful nonchalance: The number one team beat the number two team for the championship. Why would anything else have happened?
Good coaches create a vision. Great coaches block the periphery. At an event where unpredictability is the main draw, Hurley squashed the suspense and rubbed his feet in it for good measure. UConn saw only one way this all could end. To make it a certainty, there could be no uncertainty. Every shooting spell, every foul-out, every minor mental lapse — from a coach or a player — was met with an insurance plan. When Spencer went cold, Stephon Castle found his stroke. When Edey began rumbling again to coax his team into a late comeback, there was Hassan Diarra off the bench to extinguish the possibility with two strikingly similar alley-oop finishers. When Clingan picked up that dreaded fourth foul with plenty of time remaining, it didn’t matter because UConn was already too far ahead. A familiar feeling.
Postgame, Hurley shouted to anyone and everyone that UConn has owned college basketball for the last quarter century.
It’s tempting to imagine what’s possible in the next 25 years if he keeps this up.