HARTFORD, Conn. — UConn’s three exhibition games will go in the record books, even if the final scores and stats will not ultimately count, as a pair of dominating victories sandwiched by a gritty road win.
More uniquely, each of the troika of contests before Monday’s season opener against Gardner-Webb showcased a different facet of what the fourth-ranked team in the nation can ultimately become, while also revealing the latest burgeoning gem cut deep in the bowels of Dan Hurley’s diamond mine.
The Huskies’ preseason debut, a 20-point thrashing of Syracuse, was an emphatic opening salvo that established UConn as a legitimate threat to win a third national championship in five seasons. Last week’s road win against a Michigan State team ranked sixth in the preseason polls revealed the moxie and character a contending team needs to have to win in March. Tuesday night’s last preliminary, a 76-53 takedown of Purdue, brought the vaunted Husky defense to the fore and positioned UConn as perhaps one of the more complete teams in the country before the ball is even tipped in a game of consequence.
“It’s good to come out here and play high-level competition early on, to see what the team’s made of,” senior forward Jayden Ross remarked after a balanced scoring effort in which seven Huskies scored seven or more points, with four tallying double-digit markers. “Against a team like Michigan State or Syracuse, or even Purdue, you’re gonna see what the team’s made of and just see all the work that we put in. It gives us a lot of confidence because we know we put in a lot of work in the offseason.”
“We didn’t play great tonight, but I think that we’re gonna be able to learn from this. Knowing that we were able to win by 23 and we didn’t have a great night, this gives us more confidence that we’re gonna go to work and just continue to win and build it.”
The main difference in UConn’s performance Tuesday compared to its first two skirmishes was the return of Braylon Mullins. Unavailable for the Syracuse and Michigan State games, the sophomore made his unofficial season debut against the Boilermakers, recording seven points and four assists in 24 minutes.
“It was good to get back out there,” Mullins assessed. “Just being able to play with the guys again, it’s definitely a great feeling, and the preparation I’ve done this week, just being able to get out here and play some minutes and be out there, it was good.”
Mullins, much like Stephon Castle and Liam McNeeley before him, was one of the more talented freshmen Hurley was able to bring to Storrs. However, with all due respect to each of them, the player development for which UConn has become renowned may have reached a new zenith Tuesday as Colben Landrew took his latest star turn.
Landrew, projected as a lottery pick in next June’s NBA Draft should he go one-and-done as a Husky, led UConn with 15 points Tuesday, reaching the mark on 6-of-10 shooting. The rookie amassed 11 of those points after halftime, dazzling the crowd with his post moves and three-level scoring, and solidifying himself as arguably the best freshman in the Big East going into the season.
“It’s been super impressive to see how he handles business at such a young age,” a proud Ross said of Landrew. “He comes in every day with the working mindset, and we attack it. That’s my brother, man. We’re super close off the court, and when we step on the floor for practice, we know what it is. We go at it every single day, and at the end of the day, I think that’s gonna help the team.”
“I just knew he had real good instincts,“ Hurley added. “He’s a really instinctual cutter, he’s really instinctual on the offensive glass. The thing that we saw when we recruited him, I think we projected him to be a really good 3-point shooter, and it was really nice to see that start to come to fruition. But the physicality, the instincts, he’s a real talent.”
So too, at least on Tuesday, was Oskar Giltay. The Stanford transfer was pressed into a larger role in the first half after Na’jai Hines picked up two fouls in the first ten minutes of the game, and did not disappoint. Giltay recorded a dozen points, adding four rebounds and a pair of blocked shots to register a plus-26 efficiency, tying him with Nik Khamenia for the highest figure in that category.
“I think Oskar’s improved so much since the summer,” Hurley said. “And he missed five weeks with a high ankle (sprain), so he’d even be further along. I really liked his game, but we needed (Hines) to be sharper. We need to get him to play better than he played today. It’s just (that) the bar for us at center is so high that anything below what you’ve seen at center from us the last couple of years is not going to look right.”
All in all, while Hurley acknowledged he feels UConn left points on the board in each of the three exhibition games, while also being disappointed in several of his players’ rebounding totals, the coach did praise his defense and his team’s upside. A concern for Hurley was how the Huskies would come away from October, and with the defense in midseason form, plus the collective skill set of his roster expanding, he seems content to live with the minor mistakes for the sake of an enhanced payoff in March. Nights like Tuesday admittedly make the latter part easier to come by.
“There’s been vulnerabilities (that) have been exposed,” Hurley conceded. “The thing about the group, though, is like, when you’re young like we are, based on how we looked tonight and in these exhibitions, we actually have the ability to get much, much better than we are right now, because we’re youthful. We’re not a team of like, older players that have maxed out and can’t really improve a lot.”
“We got, obviously, some impressive performances from some people, from young guys, but I think there’s so many players that wore our uniform tonight that are just gonna improve so much from where we are right now. That’s probably the most encouraging thing.”
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