UConn won a national championship, but they have to reset their roster to a notable degree. This story seems familiar, doesn’t it?
Team: Connecticut Huskies
2023-24 Record: 37-3, 18-2 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: First, finishing four games ahead of both Creighton and Marquette.
Final 2023-24 KenPom.com Ranking: #1 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #4.
Final 2023-24 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #1 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #3.
Postseason: UConn is currently holding the nation’s longest active winning streak because they haven’t lost since February 20th. That was a in retrospect hilarious 19 point #BEATEMDOWN on the road against Creighton. They then ripped off 13 straight victories: Four straight to end the regular season, three in the Big East tournament, and six in the NCAA tournament to win their second straight national championship and become the first back-to-back champs since Florida in 2006 & 2007. They had just two single digit margins of victory in that 13 game winning streak: At Marquette (7) and vs St. John’s in the Big East semifinals (5).
Key Departures: UConn is losing four of their five starters from the national championship game, which was one of just four starting lineups that the Huskies used all season and the same one they used in the final 18 games of the season.
All five starters averaged double digits in scoring, so yes, that means UConn loses four of their top five scorers. Top of the chart there is Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer, who were 1-2 at 15.1 and 14.3 points per game respectively. Newton was the #49 pick in the NBA Draft, while Spencer went four picks later at #53. Newton was also the team leader in assists at 6.2 per game, and he came in second on the roster in rebounding at 6.6 a night.
The guy that led the way in rebounding was Donovan Clingan, and the 7-2 replicant of WWE World Heavyweight Champion Gunther grabbed up 7.4 rebounds per game in just 22.5 minutes per game before going #7 overall in the NBA Draft. That brings us to the least productive member of the group of notable departing guys in Stephon Castle. The 6’6” freshman had a season that most guys would beg to have: 11.1 points, 4.7 rebounds, 2.9 assists per game for the national champions. Totally fine stuff…… and he was the #4 pick in the draft. I suspect he’s fine with being fourth in terms of collegiate production in this group, huh?
Key Returners: The list starts with UConn’s only returning starter. That’s sharpshooter Alex Karaban. He could easily have elected to go to the draft after his sophomore campaign. What else is there for him to accomplish after averaging 13.3 points, 5.1 rebounds, 1.5 assists, and shooting 38% from long range while winning a second straight national championship? I guess we’ll all find out together, because he’s still on the roster.
While most of the starters are gone, UConn does return their next four scorers on the chart, although we’re only going to talk about three of them here. Hassan Diarra played the biggest part amongst the reserves, averaging over 19.4 minutes per game and chipping in 6.1 points, 3.0 rebounds, and 2.4 assists. To be honest, the assists thing is probably the most notable thing here, as playmaking is probably UConn’s biggest hole in the lineup right now. Samson Johnson managed to start seven times last season in place of Donovan Clingan, and for the time being, he’s probably their projected starter at center now. At 6’10” and 225 pounds, he’s a very different kind of big man than Clingan, so we probably shouldn’t read too much into his 2.8 rebounds in 16 minutes a night. Solomon Ball was the beneficiary of some early season injury woes for Stephon Castle, as he ended up starting 10 games, all before Christmas. His minutes got super sporadic after Castle was up and running for good, so saying he averaged 3.3 points and a rebound in 11.5 minutes isn’t really exemplary of the role he was playing in the last two months of the season.
Key Additions: The Huskies are adding three freshmen and two transfers to the fold for next season, and at a glance, it certainly seems possible that all five will be heard from by the end of the season. Let’s deal with the transfers first, and that means we have to start with Aidan Mahaney. The 6’3” guard was disturbingly consistent over his first two seasons of college hoops with Saint Mary’s, so I’m just going to say his career numbers of 13.9 points, 2.6 rebounds, and 2.6 assists tell the story just fine. He’s a career 38% long range shooter, and that’s while firing off over six per game in his 69 career outings. I’m not telling you that you can just drop him into Cam Spencer’s spot in the rotation absolutely perfectly…. but boy, it sounds close, doesn’t it? Tarris Reed might give Samson Johnson some push for the starting spot at center, and at the very least, his type of center is more like Donovan Clingan’s than Johnson’s. The 6’10”, 260 pound big man spent the last two years at Michigan, and the coaching change opened the door to his departure. After all, he averaged 9.0 points and 7.2 rebounds in nearly 27 minutes a night, I doubt Dusty May was chasing him out the door upon arriving in Ann Arbor.
As for the freshmen, I think we can safely say that Mike Woodson’s warming seat at Indiana miiiiiight have caused UConn’s gain. I’m sure the Huskies would have been just fine anyway, but they managed to make a late in the cycle addition in the form of Liam McNeeley after he withdrew his commitment to the Hoosiers. The 6’7” forward from Texas is ranked #17 in the country by 247 Sports’ Composite system and #10 in their internal numbers. Seems good!
The other two freshmen are no joke, by the way. Ahmad Nowell is a 6’0” combo guard from Philadelphia, while Isaiah Abraham is a 6’7” forward from Virginia. Those two mean we get to say that UConn has “three top 80 freshmen” as Nowell is at #37 and Abraham is at #76 in the 247 Composite rankings. Let this one linger in the back of your head for a moment and remember it when league play starts: 1) Abraham is the son of former Marquette forward Faisal Abraham and 2) Shaka Smart was very much trying to recruit Abraham to MU.
Coach: Dan Hurley, entering his sixth season with Connecticut and his 14th season as a Division 1 head coach. He has a record of 141-58 with UConn and a record of 292-163 overall, and he turned down the Los Angeles Lakers job in order to remain in Storrs.
Outlook: UConn was a dominant team in 2023-24. They started out the season at #4 in KenPom and #6 in the Associated Press poll. They never went lower than that in the poll and “slid” only as far as #8 briefly in the KenPom rankings. They didn’t lose a single neutral site game or home game all year and essentially wrecked every single team that they saw on their way to the national championship.
But they lose four starters. All to the NBA Draft, mind you, so it’s not like we have some sort of worry about what Dan Hurley is doing behind closed doors. That’s a big chunk of what made UConn the behemoth that they were this past season, and while they have a sold core of contributors returning and a high profile recruiting class coming in, I think it’s fair to raise questions as to whether or not they can do it all again.
As it turns out, we have to define “do it all again” carefully here.
For example: BartTorvik.com’s preseason projections don’t have the Huskies as a top 10 team going into next season. With that in mind, you could think that maaaaaybe they aren’t a real contender for a third straight national championship.
Except…… they are #12.
If this was an NCAA tournament seed list, they’d be a #3 seed. Nothing world beating, just very good. No one would blink an eye if a #3 seed went to the Final Four, and no one would think it was strange if a #3 seed won the whole dang thing. So yeah, they’re a national title contender. If nothing else, they’re favored to win the Big East, a league that Torvik projects with five top 40 teams this season and another just three spots past that cutoff. It’s just barely favored, as Creighton is #13 and St. John’s is #15 (oh, we’ll get to that), and the algorithm says all three teams will go 13-7, but out in front is out in front.
This is the part of the show where I do want to wonder how much of this is just “well, I guess we have to trust Dan Hurley, nothing about the last two seasons says we shouldn’t do that.” Yeah, I know, I’m talking about a computer telling you the rankings, and the computer doesn’t care. Except Gary Parrish from CBS Sports has the Huskies at #5 in his Top 25 And 1 rankings. That’s not a computer, that’s for sure. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t trust Dan Hurley, by the way. The friggin Lakers tried to hire him. He can coach some basketball, and look no further than UConn starting out the year unranked in the AP poll, #60 in Torvik, and #27 before they won the first of their two straight national championships as proof that he can do better than even the rankings and the votes think his team can perform.
There are questions, of course. UConn won two national titles on the backs of two dominant big men. Adama Sanogo was the Most Outstanding Player of the 2023 tournament, and no one — especially no one in a Marquette sweatshirt — is doubting the impact that Donovan Clingan had this past season. But both men were known quantities heading into those seasons, and I’m not sure we can say the same thing for either Samson Johnson or Tarris Reed. I’d raise a question about point guard play, but you could have easily knocked each of the last two UConn teams for not having an obvious point guard. Andre Jackson and Tristen Newton swatted that question aside easily, even if you wouldn’t necessarily point at them as the point guard even while you were watching the Huskies play.
I think, at the end of the day, the most critical thing you can say about UConn heading into the 2024-25 season is that it looks like the worst case scenario for the Huskies is “well, that was a pretty good season, just not as great as the last two.”