Having a tough act to follow has been Dan Hurley’s entire life. His brother is one of the greatest college basketball players of all time, and of course Bobby’s athletic career at the Division I level began at Duke before Dan arrived at Seton Hall. His father was the best high school coach ever to do it, and of course Dan chose to enter Bob Sr.’s profession.
This year, though, Dan Hurley was following Dan Hurley. It was Dan Hurley who set the level of expectation where Dan Hurley had to reach it.
And it was Dan Hurley who somehow found a way to do better than Dan Hurley had before – at least so far. And that is why he is our selection as The Sporting News Coach of the Year for the 2023-24 season, succeeding Rodney Terry of Texas and joining such legends as John Wooden, Lute Olson, Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Calhoun.
MORE: Sporting News 2024 All-America Team
Indeed, the 2022-23 Connecticut Huskies won the NCAA Championship last April at Houston’s NRG Stadium, which, in today’s basketball, generally means losing most or all of the talented players who made this magical occasion possible. And that happened to UConn, which saw center Adama Sanogo and guards Jordan Hawkins, Andre Jackson, Joey Calcaterra and Nahiem Alleyne depart for professional basketball or the transfer portal and take along 75 percent of the team’s scoring.
Could anyone ever have imagined UConn would be better without those terrific players? It seems inconceivable, right? And yet the Huskies made massive improvements upon their previous season in just about every category, including the one that matters most. They won the Big East regular season title for the first time in 25 years. They won more than 90 percent of their games prior to the Big East Tournament, compared to 77 percent last season.
They will enter the NCAA Tournament as a No. 1 seed after pursuing last year’s title as a No. 4 seed, and both sides of that achievement are exceedingly rare.
In 38 editions of March Madness since the field expanded to 64 teams, only nine teams seeded No. 3 or lower won the championship.
Of those nine, only three improved their seeds the following year: Florida in 2007 (from No. 3 to No. 1); Arizona in 1998 (from No. 4 to No. 1) and these Huskies.
DECOURCY'S DOZEN: Let's appreciate the greatness of UConn, Purdue, Houston
And they did all of this under the pressure of trying to win consecutive titles, something only seven programs in the nine decades of the tournament have achieved.
“A seven-bid league, three teams – with Marquette fully healthy – three potential Final Four teams or even national championship contenders. So to go 18-2 in a league like that … this year has been a brutal gauntlet,” Hurley told reporters following the team’s last regular season game.
“The two-year run these guys have been on is as good as any two-year run, from a winning standpoint, in the history of our program.”
It is not as though UConn was starving for talent as the season began. Point guard Tristen Newton, who scored 19 points in the title game victory over San Diego State, progressed from March Madness hero to first-team All-American. Center Donovan Clingan has demonstrated first-round NBA talent in replacing Final Four Most Outstanding Player Sanogo. Freshman wing Stephon Castle is the program’s most individually gifted player since Andre Drummond spent a year in Connecticut in 2011-12. Alex Karaban progressed from promising freshman to one of the most reliable stretch-4s in the nation. Transfer shooter Cam Spencer improved from 43 percent deep shooting at Rutgers last year to 45.1 percent, the fourth-best long-range accuracy figure in the nation.
And if all those players played in all these games, maybe we’d have been impressed by the work Hurley had done in coping with the player departures but still looked elsewhere to bestow our award. But that’s another element to this season that challenged the UConn staff.
MORE: Zach Edey repeats as Sporting News Player of the Year
Castle played just two games as a collegian, a mere 43 minutes, before injuring his knee and missing a half dozen games. The Huskies won five of them. In a pre-Christmas loss to Seton Hall, Clingan injured his foot and missed all or part of six games. They won five times in that stretch, as well. So they were an incomplete team for nearly all the season's first two months.
In modern college basketball, injuries wreck so many teams that don’t have the depth to manage absences. At UConn, they used their bench. Freshman Solomon Ball filled in for his classmate and averaged 28 minutes in the next eight games. Dynamic big man Samson Johnson took Clingan’s place and shot 20-of-27 from the field in that six-game period.
UConn’s staff wishes Castle had the opportunity to play against some of the lesser November opponents to continue polishing his game; that lack of opportunity to develop is part of why he ranks only fourth on the team in shots. As excellent coaches do, though, they used this occasion of misfortune to work on the available player with the potential to deepen the team.
Hurley calls him “ego-less”.
“We maintained a lot of our culture,” Hurley said. “There’s a lot of championship DNA in that group, and probably one of the best freshman classes in the country. And we were strategic in the portal. We didn’t bring in four guys from the portal and let them fight it out. We knew exactly what we needed, and Cam Spencer was a perfect fit.”
UConn lost only three times: that Seton Hall game, at Kansas and at Creighton. Like when Bobby Hurley chased a second consecutive title for Duke in the early 1990s, this has not be a perfect endeavor. It has been fruitful, though, and could be a bonanza in the end.
Another one, of course.
