A Date With Destiny
The Story: The UConn men can etch their names into history as they look to win their second straight national title tonight against Purdue in Glendale, Ariz. (9:20 p.m., TBS).
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: The Huskies’ path to their sixth national title — and immortality — will go over one more mountain. It just happens to be the biggest in college basketball: Zach Edey, the 7-foot-4, 300-pound Purdue center and two-time Wooden Award winner, who’s the most dominant player in perhaps three decades.
• Purdue, coached by Matt Painter, is a school-record 33-4 and coming off a matter-of-fact 63-50 win over N.C. State in the Final Four on Saturday night. The Boilermakers received a “subpar” game from Edey as he went for 20 points, five below his average of 25.2 points per game as Division I’s leading scorer, and 12 rebounds.
• UConn, on the other hand, had its biggest test of the NCAA Tournament against Alabama. The Crimson Tide ripped off a 7-0 run to tie the score at 56-56 with a little over 12 minutes to play. The Huskies responded with an 8-0 run of their own and outscored Alabama 30-16 to close the game and win 86-72.
• Donovan Clingan remained dominant with 18 points, five rebounds and four blocks, and Stephon Castle, whom Alabama tried to ignore on offense, finished with 21 points.
THE MATCHUP WE WANT: Clingan versus Edey has been on every basketball fan’s mind since before the season started. Edey is a dominant offensive player and immovable in the post with an adroit post-game that makes you long for the years of Kevin McHale and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
• Clingan, on the other hand, has showcased why he’s potentially a high-level NBA defensive player who wows scouts with his ability to defend in the post and protect the rim.
PAINTER ON CLINGAN: “Clingan is really good. He changes the game defensively, but offensively, he’s a good player, too. He’s just going to keep coming. He’s going to be a fabulous player. He’s got 15 to 20 years in front of him. But don’t take anything away from other guys on that front line, because they’re good players.”
DAN HURLEY ON EDEY: “It’s a unique change. He’s a unique player. I don’t think that one thing is going to work in the game. I think you’ve got to try to keep him off balance. Matt, unfortunately for us, really constructed a great roster around such a unique player.”
HURLEY HONORED: Although Hurley didn’t win the Associated Press Coach of the Year Award last week — that narrowly went to Houston’s Kelvin Sampson — he was recognized yesterday as the Naismith Coach of the Year.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR: Edey (No. 1) and Clingan (No. 2) are the two most impactful players in the country. Edey does it with his offensive efficiency and valuable, yet annoying, ability to draw fouls in the post. Edey is shooting 71 percent from the free throw line while taking a shade over 11 attempts per game.
• Clingan has experience playing big men, having gone against Ryan Kalkbrenner from Creighton five times over the past two years, While Edey is bigger and better offensively, Clingan is going to have to stay out of foul trouble. If the Huskies have to go to Samson Johnson at center, that means a double-team is coming and the Boilermakers are well-equipped to handle that.
• Lastly, for NBA buffs, this is a matchup that scouts have been waiting for. Edey has jumped into the lottery in some mock drafts, and with the draft class lacking a surefire elite-level player, Clingan is in the conversation to become the first pick by virtue of his defensive potential and growing offensive game. Both can end all doubts as to whether they can perform against NBA-level talent under pressure tonight.
BEST OF THE REST: The focus is on the big men but the national title and a place in college basketball history will come down to how the rest of the teams play.
• UConn, which doesn’t rely on any one player in particular, had Castle step up with a stellar game against Alabama’s leading scorer Mark Sears. Castle is one of the nation’s best defensive guards and his strength and explosiveness at the hoop have been impressive. Will Purdue leave him open on the perimeter? Perhaps, but Castle knocked down a pair of 3s on Saturday.
• Tristen Newton hasn’t played particularly well the last two games and is due for a breakout performance. Remember, he was the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four a year ago. Newton had 12 points and nine assists with three rebounds Saturday.
• Alex Karaban had 14 points and eight rebounds against the Crimson Tide and appears to have broken out of his shooting clump. Cam Spencer continues to show he’s more than a shooter by showcasing his rebounding, defense and playmaking skills. UConn’s biggest advantage is the quality of the bench with Johnson and Hassan Diarra and Johnson, who could start for almost any other team.
• Purdue is the nation’s top 3-point shooting team as it’s making 40.8 percent of its attempts from beyond the arc. Many of those attempts come from passes by Edey out of the post as Painter has surrounded Edey with four shooters to make teams that double him pay.
• Point guard Braden Smith averages 22 points and 5.6 assists per game and shoots 43 percent from 3-point range. Fletcher Loyer goes for 10.3 points per game and at 44.7 percent is a better 3-point shooter than 2-point shooter. Lance Jones is the other guard to worry about. He’s a scorer who shoots 35 percent from beyond the arc and can get into the lane. He averages 11.9 points per game.
• Do not foul Purdue! The referees are going to be front and center as the Boilermakers are terrific from the free throw line. All five starters shoot better than 71 percent. Loyer and the final starter, forward Mason Gillis, are shooting 86 percent from the free throw line.
WHAT DID HURLEY SAY? “For a lot of the year, we’ve used the external slights, the perceived slights, all those things — the ‘world’s against us’ mentality. I think that gets you through, like, the regular season, Big East grind, January, February, where the team’s tired and you’ve got to create these different things. Where we really used that [external motivation] — ‘Everyone’s trying to get us, they want what they got, we’re the champs, somebody is going to have to rip this out of our hands’ — we used that a lot, but once you get to this time of year, everything is just you are who your identity is. The way you play, it’s very automatic. It just comes down to hoping that it’s your night.”
OUR TAKE: UConn is going for the first back-to-back NCAA titles since Al Horford and Joakim Noah led Florida to the championship in 2006 and 2007. Prior to that, Duke did it in 1991 and 1992, and before that came UCLA’s dynasty in the 1970s. It’s very, very difficult to win two in a row, and UConn’s run is especially unique.
• Florida and Duke essentially won their second championships with the same players they had the year before. The Blue Devils featured Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner both years.
• UConn lost its top three scorers to the NBA, including a lottery pick, last season. It’s been even better this year, and if it can win one more game, the Huskies will leave little doubt how dominant their two-year run was.
• Can the Huskies be beaten? Of course they can, and Purdue has the size and shooting to do it. The Huskies are a six-point favorite but Purdue is more than a formidable opponent.
• It’s going to take the Huskies’ best game to pull this off. And, we wouldn’t want it any other way.
— John Silver
Huskies Just One Call Away
The Story: A highly controversial offensive foul on Aaliyah Edwards with 3.9 seconds remaining ended UConn’s chance to advance to the national championship game for a 13th time as Iowa held on for a 71-69 victory in the Final Four in Cleveland on Friday.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: UConn trailed 66-57 but pulled within one with 39.3 seconds left once Nika Muhl knocked down a gutsy 3-pointer. Iowa’s Hannah Stuelke, who was magnificent, committed a turnover with a little over 10 seconds to play, and Geno Auriemma called a timeout knowing that the Huskies could decide their fate.
• The Huskies inbounded the ball in the backcourt, and Muhl had it in the right corner before looking back to Paige Bueckers on the wing. But as Bueckers rolled around a screen set by Edwards on Iowa’s Gabby Marshall, officials blew the play dead, ruling that Edwards leaned into the screen and raised her left arm to make it harder for Marshall to fight through.
THE REACTION: Edwards said after the game that she never got any explanation for the call and that she thought “it was pretty clean.” Bueckers took the high road and Geno reacted as only he could.
• Bueckers: “Everybody can make a big deal of that one single play, but not one single play wins a basketball game or loses a basketball game. I feel there were a lot of mistakes that I made that could have prevented that play from even being that big or causing the game. So, you can look at one play and say, ‘Oh, that killed us,’ or, ‘That hurt us.’ But we should have done a better job — I should have done a better job — of making sure we didn’t leave the game up to chance like that and leave the game up to one bad call going our way and that deciding it.”
• Geno: “I mean, there’s probably an illegal screen call that you could make on every single possession. I just know there were three or four of them called on us and I don’t think there were any called on them. So, I guess we just gotta get better on not setting illegal screens.”
THE REST OF THE GAME: Oh, it lived up to the hype. Bueckers and Edwards each scored 17 points for UConn, and KK Arnold had 14 points while battling foul trouble for much of her 36 minutes.
• Caitlin Clark had 21 points and nine rebounds, but went 0-for-6 from 3-point range in the first half before finishing 3-for-11 from beyond the arc. Muhl and Bueckers did a phenomenal job keeping Clark in check, which is why Iowa scored nearly 20 points below its season average. As Geno said, “If you would have given me this stat sheet without the final score before the game, I would have told you we won the game.”
• UConn led by as many as 12 points in the second quarter and looked like it was going to coast to a win before Clark helped Iowa tie the score in the third quarter and surge ahead in the fourth.
• Both teams shot 46 percent and were nearly identical from 3-point range, with UConn going 8-for-25 and Iowa 7-for-25. But behind Stuelke, who had a team-high 23 points, the Hawkeyes had a 37-29 rebounding advantage and outscored the Huskies in the paint 38-32 and 10-7 in second-chance points.
WHAT ELSE DID GENO SAY? “It was an amazing run. Loved every minute of it. Incredibly grateful and tremendously disappointed.”
SOME GOOD NEWS: It wasn’t quite a terrible weekend for the Huskies as the top-ranked player in the Class of 2024, Sarah Strong, shared on Saturday morning that she had committed to UConn over North Carolina and Duke.
• Strong, a 6-foot-2 forward from about 30 minutes south of Raleigh, will join guard Allie Ziebell, the No. 4-ranked prospect from Wisconsin, and wing Morgan Cheli, the No. 18-ranked prospect from California, in arguably the nation’s strongest recruiting class.
• UConn hasn’t landed the top-ranked player in the class since Azzi Fudd, who led the Class of 2021, but has now done so three in the last five years. The other No. 1 recruits who signed with UConn in the ESPN Hoopgurlz era are Bueckers (2020), Christyn Williams (2018), Megan Walker (2017), Katie Lou Samuelson (2015), Breanna Stewart (2012), Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis (2011), Elena Delle Donne (2008) and Maya Moore (2007).
• Strong said she was “drawn to the championship culture” at UConn and that she picked the Huskies because she’s been “just watching them play … and realizing I can help them.” Too bad you couldn’t have enrolled early, Sarah.
• Depth may have been a concern for the Huskies this year, but next year should be a completely different story. We’ll get into the depth later this week, but UConn will arguably have two top-25 teams and a third that could very conceivably win a mid-major conference title. It’s wild.
— Zac Boyer
Morning Reads
• The softball team recovered from an early three-run deficit to beat St. John’s 8-3 yesterday afternoon and avoid being swept in a conference series for the first time since 2021.
• Paul Tammaro drove in Caleb Shpur in the eighth inning as the baseball team also avoided a series sweep with a 1-0 home win against Xavier yesterday.
Top photo: Stephon Castle shoots in the Huskies’ Final Four game against Alabama. (Ian Bethune for The UConn Daily
