Dan Hurley tore up the stat sheet and said his team ‘punked out.’ The UConn men’s basketball coach sat in a postgame interview Wednesday — after his No. 3 Huskies lost 71-67 at home to the No. 4 Arizona Wildcats — frustrated and disappointed with what he called a squandered opportunity to defeat one of the NCAA’s best teams.
‘We got punked,’ Hurley said. ‘It’s going to be a bad film session coming out of here. There’s a street fight going on in the paint and, you know, men can’t watch fights. You can’t stand on the outside when your buddies are in a fight. You get in the fight. You don’t stand on the periphery of the fight. We’ll see a lot of clips where guys were not in the fight with their teammates.’
Both teams entered the night undefeated, with a chance to mar a top-ranked teams’ record. Arizona remains 5-0, while UConn drops to 4-1. The Huskies’ performance was notably affected by the absence of senior center Tarris Reed Jr., who was sidelined due to a sprained ankle and is considered game-to-game. Prior to his injury, Reed Jr. was averaging 20 points and 9.3 rebounds per game before his injury.
At one point during the postgame press conference, a reporter asked Hurley about all the numbers from the game he’d been rattling off from a stat sheet on the table in front of him. Hurley promptly tore the stat sheet in half with a smirk and threw it off the table before answering.
‘Sometime around 2 a.m., 3, 4:30 am, I’m going to wake up and I’m gonna think it was just a nightmare… and then finally when I’m up and just starting to move around but I’m feeling half dead at around 7:30-8, I’m going to realize yea that we just (expletive) blew a chance to beat one of the best teams down two studs. In a game when we were down 13 and wobbling.
‘We got four more of these monsters in non-conference. We got a game on Sunday that we need to take to court with a very high level of rage and pissed off. Our people gotta get our guys healthy and on the court so we can be the team that we’re all really high on. OIt’s just, tonight sucked to lose like that.’
The Huskies next host Bryant at 6 p.m. ET Sunday. Arizona hosts the University of Denver at 10:30 p.m. ET Monday.