The Athletic, your new home for the Washington Post's former sports section, delivered 2,600 words on Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley Wednesday morning, largely on the theme of Mellowing Madman. Hurley's history as the man who smuggles wasp hives in his gym shorts and then waits for someone to brush against him by accident precedes, defines, and explains him; a shorter way of saying this is that he is "from New Jersey," but there's not much in the way of imagery there. If Hurley's personal growth was the pregame sell for UConn's Wednesday night home game with rival St. John's, the audience got hosed. This was the easiest high-profile game his hair-trigger shall ever have to navigate.
It's hard to say if the Athletic story was entirely convincing, given that he is still a piece of work in progress, but Hurley was downright zen in the sixth-ranked Huskies' pre-tournament showdown with 15th-ranked St. John's. He had no choice but to be; when the opponent chooses to make no shots whatsoever for nearly all of the second half, what's a barely hinged martinet to do but bite a hole in his chin—tightly wrapped coaches can indeed bite their own faces when properly provoked—and walk away confused but worryingly chill. He almost looked haunted.
UConn won, 72-40, and that final score flatters the Johnnies, who entered the game having won their last 13 consecutive games and had that NCAA four-seed look about them. And then, as they say within the royal family, the shit went bad. Monumentally bad. Galactically and nearly historically bad. And after awhile, laughably bad.
Or to put in strictly narrative terms, St. John's made their first shot, missed their next five, then made three, then missed 12. Properly chastened by the 15-point halftime deficit confronting them after that errant first half, they then went out and missed every field goal they attempted over the last 17:28 of the game. The final tally was 24 in a row, from 24, 11, 2, 10, 25, 12, 17, 15, 9, 16, 2, 25, 10, 2, 11, 14, 26, 2, 12, 10, 26, 26, 2, and 25 feet. That's 334 feet of misses, give or take the odd layup, parading like ants on a dessert cart with unfathomable regularity. One of the better teams in the nation served up the stuff of under-eight games at the parish gym on Saturday morning, a number so staggering that it catches even the eye of someone whose interest in the Big East ended with Patrick Ewing. No ranked team had gone so long without scoring in eight seasons; no Division I team had broadcast a test pattern in the scoring column for this long since Western Carolina in December of 2022.
Needless to say, St. John's coach Rick Pitino tried unconvincingly to take the blame, as coaches will do in such cases. This was a stand-up move, but sometimes the answer isn't in the prep or the personnel, but in the stars. What could Pitino say to the gathered tape recorders before him waiting for an analytical gem like, "Un-freaking-believable?" Because that's really the only explanation that fits; St. John's is a quality team by any standard save last night, when they were the worst team in Christendom for most of a half of basketball—just because, well, sometimes un-freaking-believable is the only explanation there is.
And Hurley? He was just as baffled as he was buttoned down, not so much a new man as an appropriately confounded one. He was probably too distracted thinking about how he's going to find things to criticize in the pre-practice meeting today. I mean, what've you got on a night like this—"He almost made that layup to cut it to 31, damn it! We cannot have slipshod defense like that in this program! YOU'RE KILLING ME!!!" Nobody can carry that off. Bobby Knight couldn't carry that off, and he was the triple-platinum standard for incomprehensible and easily summoned rage. He's been dead for a year and a half and he's still pissed about it.
But fear not, tantrum voyeurs. Hurley will be back chewing off the back of his chair and spitting splinters onto the court, if for no more convincing reason that Saturday's opponent, Seton Hall, is a good bit to mix in the odd field goal here or there. And Hurley will be right where he has always been most comfortable, making sure that someone has to pay for that. St. John's will return to the mean more or less by default, and Hurley will, too.
