UConn leads list of men’s college basketball’s biggest disappointments so far this season

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UConn Huskies coach Dan Hurley looks frustrated at his team’s play against the Dayton Flyers during the final round of the Maui Invitational. (Photo by Brian Spurlock/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

The day that the Associated Press revealed its preseason Top 25, UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley described his team’s No. 3 ranking as a show of disrespect.

Hurley argued that the two-time reigning national champion Huskies earned the right to start the new season No. 1 after bulldozing through the previous two NCAA tournaments “like no one has in a very long time.”

“We dominate for the [2023] national championship, we lose all the players, and then we’re even better,” Hurley told CT Insider in mid-October. “We dominate even more, we lose all the players … I think we should’ve been voted first.”

The notion that AP voters undervalued UConn unraveled last week in Maui when the Huskies looked stunningly unprepared for their first tests of the season. They dropped three games in three days to finish dead last at the Maui Invitational, suffering narrow losses to Memphis and Colorado before enduring an 18-point shellacking against Dayton.

Those results suggest that, if anything, AP voters afforded excessive deference to UConn’s championship pedigree and didn’t weigh heavily enough the departure of four 2024 NBA Draft picks. No team that beat UConn in Maui is ranked higher than 24th at KenPom. Colorado was projected to finish second-to-last in the Big 12 entering the season.

To say that UConn (5-3) has been college basketball’s biggest disappointment so far is a massive understatement. This is a Huskies team that began the season with aspirations of becoming the first men’s college basketball program since John Wooden-era UCLA to win three consecutive national championships.

For UConn to even approach preseason expectations, the Huskies must dramatically improve defensively. They allowed 1.34 points per possession against Memphis, 1.20 against Colorado and…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/uconn-leads-list-of-mens-college-basketballs-biggest-disappointments-so-far-this-season-153132930.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-12-02 15:31:00

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