By the time Tristen Newton left the UConn men’s basketball program, he knew the Huskies’ sophisticated offense like the back of his hand. But it wasn’t that way immediately.
Now with the Indiana Pacers, Newton’s command has been missed in Storrs.
The reigning back-to-back champions turned the ball over 19 times against an East Texas A&M team that was ranked No. 352 in the country by KenPom entering Tuesday’s game. UConn left with a 35-point win, but coach Dan Hurley and veteran players Alex Karaban and Hassan Diarra couldn’t help but measure themselves up to the standard that they, along with Newton and their other former teammates established.
“We’re not seeing it the way Andre Jackson saw it and Tristen saw it, Cam (Spencer) saw it, Steph (Castle) saw it and Alex sees it,” Hurley said, asked about Aidan Mahaney, the transfer from St. Mary’s who has shown glimpses of Newton and Spencer in his game.
Mahaney, averaging 5.8 points and 2.3 assists on 30% shooting from the field, has needed some time to adjust. So did Newton when he came from East Carolina.
“It’s the other things,” Hurley said, encouraged that Mahaney’s scoring will eventually pick up after his season-high 10 points Tuesday night. “He’s got to defend. He’s got to make plays on the ball. He’s got to be disruptive defensively, he’s got to take a charge, he’s got to play basketball. He’s got to see things, he’s got to see rollers.”
East Texas A&M played a unique style of defense where they would switch on and off the ball to try to negate all of UConn’s off-ball and ball screen movement. As Hurley explained, when facing that type of defense, it is critical for perimeter players to have the vision to find open opportunities.
“We have a lot of the same opportunities from an offensive standpoint (from the last two years),” Hurley continued. “I think our perimeter people are not seeing each other in a lot of things that we do offensively when there’s opportunities to hit cutters, rollers, people for open 3s.”
It isn’t only Mahaney, though the question about his play sparked Hurley’s response. Diarra, a veteran of the system in his third year, led the team with five turnovers and took accountability after the game.
The missed opportunities led to only five shot attempts for Karaban, who led the team in scoring through the first three games and will be counted on as a potential All-American candidate and the face of the program this season.
“We’ve seen teams switch everything last year and we were well prepared for it. Even this game we were super prepared, that’s all we talked about for the last four days is, we’ll see this team switch everything,” Karaban said. “We were prepared, we just didn’t do it at all. Last year when we saw teams do that, we were prepared and we executed it perfectly… I don’t think you can easily flush this at all. I think everyone in the locker room has got to be honest with ourselves and really just reflect on what we need to do better as a team. It starts with us players just holding each other more accountable.”
Worse was what came after UConn built its lead to 37 points with 12 minutes to go in the second half. The Lions continually drove the lane and got to the basket, and to the free throw line, as they put together a 12-2 scoring run and closed the game with a 19-17 spurt. UConn allowed 10 offensive rebounds and eight steals in the second half.
“Listen, we do this 11 months a year. We start in June and we practice all summer, all preseason. A program that goes 11 months a year, you could have a bad shooting night, but you can’t turn the ball over 19 times in a game like this here,” Hurley said. “You can’t have a bad second-half rebounding performance and you can’t have people falling to the ground, stumbling around and turning the ball over. When you’ve established such a level of play in our program and we work so hard in what we do as a program, you could have bad shooting nights, but you just can’t play like that. That’s not acceptable.”
“We play at UConn,” Karaban added. “And we’ve got to get better every single game. We’ve got to play to the identity and we’ve got to play to the standard and that wasn’t it at all. So you can’t just flush it and forget about this performance.”
The late-game mistakes could be attributed to the team cruising to an easy win for the fourth game in a row. UConn’s strength of schedule to this point is ranked the fourth-easiest in the country by KenPom, and human nature certainly set in to take what Hurley felt should’ve been a 55- or 60-point margin of victory down to 35 – the closest game the team has played this year.
That will change after the team flies out to Maui for three games against potential NCAA Tournament teams next week. After that trip, UConn has one more buy game against UMES – ranked No. 360 by KenPom – before rounding out its nonconference slate with a gauntlet against Baylor, Texas and Gonzaga.
“There’s the thing where scheduling caught up to us today, I hope that’s what it is,” Hurley said. “It just didn’t work out for us that we could have mixed a high-major game in to break up some of these games. It’s just the way that the schedule fell for us here… I think it’s gonna be really good for us to go out and play some big games in a big tournament, I think it will be really good for the team.”
