Dom Amore: When Dan Hurley, UConn men need a certain spark, it’s time for another ‘G.O.A.T. Talk’ with Jim Calhoun
STORRS — Dan Hurley strode from his post-game press conference after a tense, but ultimately satisfying win over St. John’s on Dec. 23 at the XL Center.
“Sam,” he said, as he walked by Sam Calhoun, a journalism student at UConn. “The G.O.A.T was in yesterday. … He ripped the boys yesterday, too. It was awesome. … It was awesome.” After nearly six years, veteran listeners know Hurley-speak by now. He has a lot of “G.O.A.T.S,” players, coaches, staffers he freely calls the greatest of all time. He has a lot of mentors, and he’s not shy about calling on them.
But here a scorecard was not needed to know he was talking about Jim Calhoun, Sam’s grandfather, the coach who built the UConn program and forged its first three championships, most of his teams noted for toughness. It’s the operative word of the moment.
“We need to do a better job of that – toughness,” Alex Karaban said, sporting a bruise above his left eye earned in the St. John’s game, and aggravated during an after-Christmas practice. “The Big East, it’s tough. Rebounding wars. Defensively. All of that stuff. Everything needs to improve, toughness-wise.”
There is a bronze bust of him in the lobby of the Werth Center, but Calhoun, 81, isn’t yet ready to fade into history; he remains a flesh-and-blood presence, a trained eye, close as the phone, or a relatively short ride down Route 44 when the kind of two cents only he can put in are needed. As Calhoun watched the Huskies drop their Big East opener at Seton Hall by 15 points, they were needed.
“(Calhoun) was probably the first person to text me after the Seton Hall game,” Hurley said. “Both like, supportive, but also, like ‘that’s not what you’ve built here,’ that type of thing.”
Said Calhoun: “Danny has probably used this phrase 100 times, ‘we’re going to have a G.O.A.T. talk,’ … I share with him things that are important to me, about the school, about the team.”
So Calhoun came to practice Dec. 22, stood in the middle of a circle and, let’s say, shared his observations. It wasn’t just G.O.A.T bluster, it was tough love.
“He said we had to play harder, can’t come out slow,” Tristen Newton said. “This is a unique place and we need to win those type of games, just go out there and play better, play harder, keep the legacy of UConn going.”
Calhoun, during his decades as coach, often said he “loved big games and hated small ones,” and now that he has retired, 11 1/2 years removed from UConn and a couple of years from hanging it up at Saint Joseph’s, Calhoun follows that. He comes to big games. He sat a few rows up from the bench at the XL Center for the St. John’s game, legs crossed, looking like a man checking in on his investment, rather than a fan. Sometimes a scowl, at the end some satisfaction crept onto his face as the Huskies came out with the win.
He thought UConn was bullied at Seton Hall, the guards pushed around, and he let them know they were too good to let that that happen, an approach he once used with Ray Allen. He’d start by telling Ray how great a player he was, then let him know that because he was so great a player, this lapse, or that, can’t be allowed to happen.
“He came in here and, rightfully so, he ripped the group for playing soft,” Hurley said. “Coach has been a great resource for me, and the staff and team. He’s strategic (in) when he comes in and speaks to the group, he did it last year at key moments.”
Several times during the championship run, Calhoun came to reinforce to the players that they were good enough to win it all. “I told them, ‘I could smell it, I could see it, because we’d done it here four times.'”
And Hurley, to his credit, is secure enough in his ability to let someone else into the circle, let his players hear another voice, especially a voice with Calhoun’s gravitas.
“He has a thirst to learn, to ask ‘how did you do it?'” Calhoun said. “He said to me, ‘you’re the one person who truly knows what this is like,’ to be the head coach in a place that really cares, that overreacts to everything.”
As the Huskies, who were 11-2 and ranked fourth in the national poll before their third conference game against DePaul on Tuesday night, are working through their latest adventure, a quest to repeat as national champs, something no UConn team, and very few others, have ever done. The task for the new year is finding leadership to replace the players who are gone, and rediscover the toughness they left behind.
“We lost a lot of leadership, we lost a lot of toughness and obviously depth, too,” Hurley said. “Three things for my New Year’s resolution: I want leadership, I want toughness and I want more players to be playable so we can have a deeper team.”
Leadership, in the form UConn had it last year with Andre Jackson and Adama Sanogo, will be hard to replicate. How soon the freshmen can improve to the point they are, in Hurley’s eyes, “playable” could vary.
But toughness can come to the fore at any time. Newton, who was as productive and effective as any player in the country during the Huskies’ nonconference games, is the most logical candidate to bring that mental and physical toughness. During the final minutes against St. John’s, Hurley thought Newton “grew as a leader.” He’s looking for more.
“It’s by example, but it’s also verbal,” Hurley said. “Tristen has got to accept more responsibility for that. We’ve got to see him more engaged in games in terms of leading the group. He’s played great. He’s put himself in the conversation for potentially All-American, to being a player of the year candidate, but with that also comes the burden of leadership. You’re the returning point guard on the national champion.”
There will be nights when UConn will be out-shot, nights where the shots just won’t fall or the opponent can’t miss. There will be nights when foul trouble trips the Huskies up, nights when they turn it over too many times.
But defending champs should not out-toughed very often, and trained eyes will be watching.
“We use the word a lot — culture,” Calhoun said “Culture equals ‘the way we do things.’ Consistency.”
