STORRS — Opening Night comes with jitters, butterflies, a certain fear of the unknown. What if you’ve scripted and scored, say, a college basketball equivalent of South Pacific and Oklahoma! back to back?
Everyone comes to Broadway expecting you to knock it out of the park all over again, another unforgettable show. Gotta be Cats, Phantom, Wicked, Hamilton, so what’s next for the UConn men?
It’s bad luck to say good luck, especially on Opening Night, and you may have heard or read somewhere that the UConn men’s basketball coach, producer of back to back championships, can be a little superstitious. So there came a point Wednesday when Andrea Hurley essentially told her husband to break a leg, but get the heck out of her house. Just go to the theatre, already.
“Andrea was excited to get me out of the house and just get me away from her,” Dan Hurley said. “… Opening Night, it’s like the worst day of the year. I think the thing that drives me out of coaching is how you feel when you wake up on Opening Night and you don’t know what your team’s about to go through. So, there you go. Happy it’s over.”
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It’s a new cast for UConn this season, a new script, the themes are “dynasty” and “three-peat.” True, the early games against mid-majors like Sacred Heart are for identifying and getting rid of the songs and dialogue that do not work, but the Huskies’ 92-56 victory Wednesday night brought the crowd out of the seats, applauding great performances from Alex Karaban in the lead, newcomer Liam McNeely, breakout star Solo Ball, and others. Chemistry? Always a concern with a new show, but UConn had 25 assists on 32 baskets, and only 13 turnovers.
“That’s championship-level basketball,” Sacred Heart coach Anthony Latina said, admiringly. “If we want to be good, we’ve got to play like them, the way they share the ball.”
So it looks like Dan Hurley has a another hit on his hands.
“We’re going to get drastically better throughout the year,” Hurley said. “People are imagining what the team looked like last year, but you can’t compare what you saw at the end of last year to what we looked like tonight and say ‘they don’t look as good as the last time we saw them in Phoenix.’ It took us a while to get that good.”
Most exciting to Hurley is the thought of getting sophomore Jayden Ross, who is out with an injury, back on the floor soon. Ross, Hurley said, has “taken off like a skyrocket.” He’s envisioning Ross, 6 feet 7, joining Karaban, Ball, McNeeley and one of the centers, Samson Johnson or Tarris Reed Jr., for a team position-less team with exceptional size, versatility, a new, nightmarish concept for opponents.
Karaban had 20 points, seven assists, seven blocks and six rebounds, McNeely had 18 points and 10 rebounds, Ball had 16 points, going 4-for-7 on 3-pointers. The centers combined for 24 points and 14 rebounds. Only the point guards, Aidan Mahaney and Hassan Diarra, had off nights, going 1-for-9 with nine assists and four turnovers.
Opening Night jitters aren’t limited to composers and directors. Even seasoned, dependable stars feel them back stage.
“You’re curious about everything,” Karaban said. “You only see so much during practices, and we go through some of the most brutal practices out there, so it can get ugly or it can be very beautiful in practice. You kind of just want to see how everything is. I thought we did a great job of that, especially on Opening Night, especially the new guys out there, first time playing in Gampel. Obviously, I feel we can improve on everything. You don’t win a national championship now, you’ve got to built the steps to get there.”
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Reed’s mother told him how strange it was to see him on stage in a UConn jersey, after he transferred from Michigan. McNeely, the true freshman, was more wide-eyed than his poised performance indicated.
“Basketball is what gives me life,” he said. “Being able to play is what I live for.”
Only so much can be can be determined on Opening Night, but some may be old enough to remember a complete flop against Wagner, followed by another against Northeastern in 2016 that basically left the theatre dark after three days. We’ll know a little more about this new UConn season when Ross joins the cast, and with full-dress rehearsals against New Hampshire on Saturday night, then Le Moyne and Texas A&M-Commerce before the show goes on tour in Hawaii Nov. 25, gets to Broadway later on.
“(Last year) was probably one of the best teams in certainly the last 20 years, maybe in the history of college basketball,” Latina said. “To compare anything to that is probably not fair. They didn’t have a single-digit game in the NCAA Tournament. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know that the individual talent is quite at that level, and that’s not a knock, but having Alex Karaban back has really made them legitimate top-five team, because he’s so smart, he’s so good, his feel, his leadership is just apparent when you see it. You have that and some dynamic young talent, they’re going to be right there. This is a legitimate Final Four contender, no question.”
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All of this was well known, anticipated before the third-ranked Huskies raised the curtain, literally, unshrouding the 2024 NCAA championship banner, before the game. Hurley’s stomach was still churning — not even Rogers and Hammerstein could rest on the laurels of their last hit show.
“That was awesome, I cared for 90 seconds and I cared no longer,” Hurley said. “The banner, actually pretty cool, but I just wanted to get back to the locker room, I just wanted to play the game. We’ve celebrated enough stuff.
Donovan Clingan, Steph Castle, Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer are gone, this cast will have to make it on its own merits. The early reviews indicate this one will be playing for a while.
“I don’t think we have to be as good as the team was last year to compete for trophies and make a deep run in March,” Hurley said, “but I’m real excited. You see the vulnerabilities, but I also see a team that’s got great potential. We’re going to be competing for the same things we’ve bee competing for the last two years.”
