Don’t Look Now, But UConn Has Found Its Second Gear

The answer after one weekend in the 2023 men’s NCAA tournament: not just good UConn, great UConn.

After blowing away Rick Pitino and Iona on Friday, the Huskies took it to Saint Mary’s in the second half in a convincing 70–55 victory Sunday to punch their ticket to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2014. UConn looked like the overwhelming version of itself, the one that blew through top-end competition en route to a No. 2 overall national ranking in mid-to-late December.

“It feels like we’re unbeatable,” UConn sophomore wing Jordan Hawkins said. “The last two games in the second half, we just took off. When we're playing like that, I think we have a really good chance to win it all.”

UConn wasn’t just winning at the start of the season, it was running teams out of the gym. It beat six straight high-major teams by double figures during that early unbeaten stretch, including a 15-point win against No. 1 overall seed Alabama during Thanksgiving weekend. 

The Huskies’ performances this weekend in Albany had a similar feel. It seemingly took yeoman’s efforts from Iona and Saint Mary’s just to hang around in the first half, then UConn pounced in the second to pull away. No player illustrated that more than Hawkins, who was held scoreless in the first half of both games, then exploded for 13 in the second against Iona and 12 against Saint Mary’s.

“You have to have a perimeter weapon this time of year that can deliver big performances and create some separation during the game,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said of Hawkins. “We felt great about the position we were in because we knew he was going to get hot.”

When Hawkins and the rest of this UConn lineup are making threes, there is little any team can do to stop them—the Huskies are 12–0 when shooting better than 40% from beyond the arc and 14–2 when making 10 or more triples. When they are falling, the three-pointers tend to come in bunches, just as they did Sunday, making five in a seven-minute stretch to pull away.

Stopping Adama Sanogo and Donovan Clingan in the post is hard enough. Doing it when you can’t afford to send help? Impossible. Clingan is dominant in spurts, but Sanogo was ridiculously good all weekend. His second-half double-double against Iona was perhaps his best 20 minutes of basketball this season, and he followed that up with 24 points and eight rebounds Sunday.

“If you look at most teams' records, most teams have lost six, seven, eight games, even the best teams if you look at their overall record,” Hurley said Friday. “We just lost a bunch of games during a really tight stretch.”

UConn is 11–2 since then, posting seven double-digit victories in that stretch and its only losses coming at Creighton and against Marquette in the Big East tournament.

Championship-level teams often feel unbeatable when they reach that second gear, and that gear was on display by UConn in Albany.

“We were bricking threes [during the skid],” Hurley said. “We went through a stretch where our bench three-point shooters were in a rut. … I think maybe just the days off after the Big East season has kind of refreshed Adama, and it’s refreshed the team.”

The Huskies will have a shorter turnaround before making the cross-country trip to Las Vegas, where they’ll face Arkansas on Thursday. But UConn looks far more comfortable and has gotten out of the doldrums of conference play against physical teams that repeatedly scouted the Huskies. UConn’s depth (nine players average more than 14 minutes per game) should also aid them throughout the tournament, even if Hawkins continues to get off to slow starts.

“We have so many guys we can go to,” Andre Jackson said. “No matter if somebody is having an off day or an off game, somebody is going to step up in those shoes and be ready for the big moment.”