Dan Hurley on UConn men's basketball team after first practice: 'Love the talent. It's young'
· Yahoo Sports
STORRS - If any further evidence was needed that the UConn men's basketball team was back at official practices on Tuesday, Dan Hurley provided it during one 5-on-5 drill.
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"What the (bleep) is going on!!!," he shouted at his players after one particularly sloppy sequence.
Hurley, a man whose own father says isn't content unless he's complaining about something, certainly had some grievances on Tuesday, before and after the Huskies' three-hour practice. He wasn't happy to see Braylon Mullins on the sidelines during practice due to an undisclosed "minor" injury, though he expects the sophomore sharpshooter to be good to go in a week to 10 days.
"Not a big deal," he insisted. "Everybody calm down."
He admitted there are times when packing the Huskies' non-conference schedule with seven Power Four foes, most of whom will be highly-ranked in the AP preseason Top 25 poll, feels like a lapse in judgment.
"Sometimes, when you have a bad day, or you look and Braylon's on the side, you say, 'Oh my God, what did I do,?'" he quipped.
And then there's current state of college basketball, with rampant roster uncertainty around the nation as former pros try to play in college again or 24-year-old Europeans look to battle 19-year-old American kids. In case you weren't aware, Hurely is not a fan, which is why he hopes the Save College Sports Act passes Congress (despite Sen. Chris Murphy's objections).
"You want to compete for national championships, but you also want to feel like you're developing young people," Hurley noted. "That's the joy of being a college coach. We've gotten away from that in college, which is why it's hard to figure out who you're going to be playing."
Overall, however, Hurley was in positive spirits on Tuesday. He feels that in Mullins and Silas Demary Jr., he may have the best backcourt in college basketball. In sophomore transfers Na'jai Hines and Oskar Giltay, he's got a two-headed monster at center that should be better defensively than last season.
He's got Duke transfer Nik Khamenia looking like a reasonable facsimile of Alex Karaban, the man he's replacing at power forward, and Wofford transfer Nils Machowski taking on the role of Joey California (or, even more optimistically, Cam Spencer). He's got veteran Jayden Ross and ultra-talented freshman Colben Landrew battling for minutes at small forward, and Junior County as a freshman with veteran moxie as Demary's backup at point.
And he's got a blueprint for success that makes him a different, better coach than he was when he took over the program nine seasons ago.
"The motivation, desire and ambition to achieve championship success is maybe even greater," he admitted. "Because you've experienced it, you want to experience it again. You want that back in your bloodstream. Badly."
"When you've been able to climb that mountain," he added, "you know your way works."
Here's another thing about the 2026-27 UConn men's basketball team, which will be playing an exhibition game against Syracuse in three weeks and kicking off that insane non-conference schedule three weeks after that: They're young.
Younger than the back-to-back national champions of 2023 and 2024, as well as last year's national runners-up. As Hurley pointed out numerous times on Tuesday, six of UConn's top nine rotation players will be freshmen and sophomores. And that doesn't even include Egor Amosov, a freshman from Russia who could work his way into the rotation.
"I love the talent. It's young,"Hurley noted. "But they're all guys with all types of talent. Sometimes, it's good to have some roster turnover, bringing in hungry people that haven't experienced it yet. They see all these banners and pictures and nets and trophies. If you're a new player and haven't experienced that, you want to see what all the fuss is about."
As Hurley also pointed out, this was hardly the Huskies' first practice of the season. UConn essentially begins its season in June, with a week off mid-summer and two weeks off prior to the return to school in late-August, then about a month of shorter workouts before official practices start. With that in mind, the veterans have tried to integrate the new guys since June.
"There's a focused effort by the returners to get guys up to speed," said Ross, a senior. "It's hard. But that's what we took a lot of the summer to do, and a lot of the guys are either there or pretty close to their standards."
Ah yes, standards ... popular word on Tuesday, right up there with "young" and Hurley's favorite expletive.
"Everybody's embracing the standard we have to be at every day, how hard we've got to practice every day, what it means to be a UConn day," Demary said. "We're young. But that's not a problem. The connectivity with this team is off-the-charts. This year's team is one of the closest I've been on, and I feel like last year's team was super-close."
There was even a team trip to Dave & Buster's the other day. Demary won the pop-a-shot contest. Mullins and Khamenia, mortal enemies last March and now roommates, split their tickets to get a Husky doll for their room.
"We've been practicing like dogs since June," said Hurley, a generally happy camper on Tuesday. "We feel like we're going to get the players there, because we've got evidence."
Rim rattlings
• Former UConn star and 2023 national champion Jordan Hawkins has been working out at the Werth Family Champions Center until training camp begins with his new team, the Memphis Grizzlies. Hawkins was traded to Memphis (where he'll be a teammate with Cam Spencer) earlier this month after spending his first three seasons with the New Orleans Pelicans.
"It's great to see him get a fresh start," said Hurley. "We're trying to get him back on track."
"It's great to have a champion here," Demary added. "To understand what he did, what he went through, picking his brain on how I can lead a team to a championship. And seeing that guys are willing to come back ... he could be anywhere right now preparing for training camp. He came back here."
• While UConn's non-con slate is historically tough, there is one date in particular that Ross has circled on his calendar.
"That second game is definitely on my mind," he said of a Nov. 6 national title game rematch with Michigan at TD Garden in Boston.
• Demary has switched his uniform number from No. 2 to No. 5, his favorite number.
"There's five people in my family," he pointed out. "It's something I stand on."
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