Is UConn Already In Trouble?
Connecticut's record is currently below bubble level, along with fellow preseason Top 25 members Arizona, Creighton, Rutgers, Houston, Arkansas and UCLA.
The Connecticut men’s basketball team has been so consistently dominant in recent years that it’s almost easy to forget where their streak of success began. It all started with a 2022-23 team that began the season unranked… stormed to a 13-0 start… then stumbled with 7 losses in 12 games after Christmas… before hitting their stride again in mid-February. They have been on a near-continuous roll ever since, going on to compile two of the greatest NCAA tournament runs in modern history.
That’s what makes the team’s recent hiccups to begin the 2024-25 season so surprising. Instead of picking up where they left off, the Huskies looked uncharacteristically shaky in losing three straight at the Maui Invitational to Memphis, Colorado and Dayton, leaving fans to wonder if their reign at the top might actually be in jeopardy — particularly ahead of tonight’s game against a Baylor team that actually has a slightly higher KenPom rating.
Between those three losses and a fine-but-nothing-special performance against New Hampshire (one of the worst teams in the country) earlier in the season, UConn has already had four performances that grade as 80 or lower in Bart Torvik’s Game Score system through their first eight games of 2024-25. That may not sound too bad, since a score of 50 is average, but consider that the Huskies had only four outings graded 80 or lower all of last season. In fact, in their past seven contests alone, they’ve had the same number of games graded 80 or lower than in their preceding 56 games, a run that dated back to Feb. 7, 2023.
Normally, we’d look at a team like Connecticut, with just 43.2 percent continuity in minutes from last year — and four of its Top 5 scorers heading off to the NBA — and cut the Huskies a bit of early slack in figuring out the right mix to win games. But UConn is also a victim of its own success. Coach Dan Hurley did such a phenomenal job covering for the losses from his previous champion — names like Adama Sanogo, Jordan Hawkins, Andre Jackson and Joey Calcaterra — that it was practically assumed he could immediately mold together a dominant outfit again the way he did with last year’s Huskies.
This year’s version has arguably as much talent as any Hurley has coached at Storrs, with holdovers Alex Karaban (an NBA first-round prospect), Solo Ball, Hassan Diarra, Samson Johnson, Jaylin Stewart and Jayden Ross joined by top recruit Liam McNeeley and 4-star transfers Tarris Reed Jr. and Aidan Mahaney. But the Huskies’ rotation isn’t quite clicking together yet — especially on defense, where they rank an un-Uconn-like 85th nationally per KenPom — and Karaban is still recovering from a head injury he suffered in the loss to Dayton.
While it feels a bit premature to wonder if the two-time defending champs are actually in danger of missing the NCAA tournament, they were listed as a 9-seed in Joe Lunardi’s latest Bracketology update and Torvik’s projection has them as one of the last teams to escape the First Four play-in games. While Torvik’s forecast also gives the Huskies an 82 percent chance of getting an at-large bid, we might quickly get a sense for just how much of a threat UConn is to win a third straight title. If they lose to Baylor, their bid odds would drop to 64 percent; that number would be 69 percent if they lose to Texas, and 71 percent if they lose to Gonzaga.
UConn isn’t alone among touted teams off to a rough start in 2024-25. As of Tuesday afternoon, seven schools who went into the season ranked among the AP Top 25 were below water in Torvik’s Wins Above Bubble metric, which compares a team’s record to a team right on the cutline for an NCAA bid:
Connecticut’s path to digging out of that early hole starts with a win hosting Baylor tonight. And whatever happens, there are plenty of reasons to believe the Huskies we see in March will be far better than they are now. But as much as UConn teams of the past have coalesced late — from Kemba Walker and Shabazz Napier to Hurley’s own 2023 squad — you never want to wait too long before finding your stride.
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