MILWAUKEE – It will be a long four days for the UConn men’s basketball team until it returns to game action at Madison Square Garden Thursday night for the Big East Tournament Quarterfinal.
The Huskies saw their hopes of a regular season championship dashed in a 68-62 loss at Marquette on Saturday, which ended in dramatic fashion as coach Dan Hurley was ejected with one second left on the game clock. It was the team’s worst offensive performance of the year, and it will serve as a major blemish on the team’s resumé when it comes time for seeding in the NCAA Tournament.
But the focus now turns to the conference tournament, where the Huskies still have an opportunity to hoist a trophy before the big dance.
“Right now you’re thinking about what you just lost,” Hurley told local reporters in the hallway after his postgame press conference at Fiserv Forum. “You go home, you pick the pieces up and you go on from there… We’ve gotta get on the airplane and really break down what happened and just move on from this.”
UConn, locked in as the No. 2 seed, will play in the 7 p.m. game on Thursday at MSG, which will air on FS1.
The Huskies will meet the winner of Wednesday’s 6:30 p.m. game between No. 7 seed Marquette and No. 10 seed Xavier. UConn went 3-1 against its potential opponents this season, the only loss being Saturday’s at Marquette.
“The beauty of it is we have another championship that we’re going for, and that’s next week in the tournament,” said center Tarris Reed Jr. “That’s not gonna be easy, it’s gonna be harder than ever coming off the loss we just had. I feel like we could make it all right by going into the tournament next week and dominating… We still have more to do, more to accomplish, it’s not over yet. We’ve got to really learn from this because we don’t want this happening anymore in March. It could be two games left in our season, minimum. So we’ve got to really be able to turn it around right now.”
The loss in Milwaukee will serve as a wake-up call for the Huskies, who came into the final week of the regular season ranked No. 4 in the AP Poll.
“From here on out, it’s win or go home,” Silas Demary Jr. said. “Now it’s like, do we want to keep playing? Do we want to keep practicing together? Or do we want to just lay down and let the season be over? I don’t think we’re gonna do that. I think we’re gonna go back to the drawing board, figure out what we need to fix so we can make this run.”