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5 questions with UConn’s Dan Hurley

Dan Hurley has separated himself from the rest of college basketball. After leading UConn to back-to-back national titles in dominant fashion, the 51-year old head coach has his sights set on a third. I caught up with Hurley on Tuesday in Storrs to discuss the Huskies’ quest for a three-peat, which players need to emerge for UConn during the 2024-25 season, and much more.

Jon Rothstein: How soon after winning a second straight national title did you start thinking about winning a third?

Dan Hurley: On the plane home from Phoenix to Connecticut the day after the national title game, maybe for an hour or so. I was thinking about the roster and thinking about where the sites are for the 2025 NCAA Tournament.

Rothstein: When you’re trying to win back-to-back national titles, there’s many different people in sports that can you use as a resource. Have you been able to reach out to anyone who’s given you advice on how to deal with the quest of attempting to try and win three in a row?

Hurley: Not at this point. I just think that we need to approach this upcoming season kind of the same way that we just approached this past season. I don’t think that you need a lot of advice on how to deal with that. I sought all of that out through Billy Donovan, Jay Wright, and Coach K and some of the people I talk to when I was trying to go back-to-back a year ago. I think we just take the same approach as we took this past year. I think I do a great job of rooting out complacency, so that’s what we’re focused on.

Rothstein: How will the makeup of this team be different than the past two?

Hurley: It’s a similar feeling. Last summer, you’re just adjusting to a new group. You lose several players (Jordan Hawkins, Adama Sanogo, Andre Jackson) that played great basketball two years ago. Just seeing those people not in the circle and not playing — it’s the same thing this year with different people missing. We’re just trying to find the best way to play with this group, which I think is a talented group. It’s maybe a little bit of a deeper team in terms of the desire to maybe play nine or 10 players as opposed to it probably being an eight-man rotation in the past two years. I didn’t think we were very good last summer or the summer before. We probably didn’t think we had a really good team until the end of February or beginning of March during this past year. As a coach, you’re just always insecure about your team until late in the season.

Rothstein: There’s certain known commodities — Hassan Diarra, Alex Karaban, and Samson Johnson — who are back from last season’s team. Who out of your newcomers needs to play at an All-Big East caliber level for your team to flirt with what it’s done the past two years?

Hurley: We’re going to need minutes from all these guys. Tarris (Reed) has to give us that one-two punch at center with Samson (Johnson). Unlike a lot of programs in both the NBA and college, the center position has been very important for us both offensively and defensively. He’s critical. Aidan (Mahaney) is probably one of the most important guards in the country this year in terms of what we need from him. We need the level of his guard play to be comparable to what we had with Tristen Newton and Cam Spencer last season. And then we need Liam McNeeley to be an anti five-star freshman like Steph Castle was. We need him to have humility and the ability to do whatever we need on a nightly basis. Liam is going to be a critical guy for us as well.

Rothstein: Because of the bar that you’ve set here at UConn, the only way that you and your team will satisfied about next season is if you win another national title. How do you stay process driven when that’s again clearly the only goal?

Hurley: So much of that is settled at the end of the year. It’s so far down the road that all you can focus on is are we playing the right way based on our talent and are we getting the absolute most out of the next thing that we do as a team, whether that’s a summer practice or preseason conditioning. For us, we are at the point as a program where it’s championships or bust. Just going into the year, you’re in the proper position if you have a group that you think is capable of getting to the Final Four or winning the Big East. We certainly feel like with this group that we have enough talent here to go into a season to do the things that we want to do.

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