Dan Hurley’s path to this — two games away from a national championship and a comprehensive favorite to achieve it — began by wanting to be like his dad.
The UConn head coach rarely thought of things like Final Fours years ago, when his idea for an ideal career was to mirror his old man, which meant to coach high school hoops and do it really, really well.
As the Huskies have stormed their way through the NCAA Tournament and made a mockery of their 4-seed, even in a year filled with upsets, it has grown ever clearer that the latest edition of UConn is flexing its muscles and is an intricate reflection of its coach.
The group is relentless because Hurley is relentless, because his life has been basketball, lived and breathed, all the time, for how could it be any other way when your father is Bob Hurley, New Jersey coaching legend, and one of the few high school coaches to be enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame.
In the Hurley family, the cells are made up of protons and electrons and microscopic basketballs, and Bob’s decades-long devotion to the craft reached a wider audience, finally, when Adrian Wojnarowski wrote “The Miracle of St. Anthony” in the mid-2000s.
For all his Wojbombs and breaking-news tweets and draft-day reveals, that book might be the most singularly beautiful piece of writing from Wojnarowski, a tour de force deserving of the big screen.
It is about a group of gritty young men from the toughest part of a tough city (Jersey City) who came to an underfunded prep school run by two Felician nuns to be drilled in the fine arts of basketball by an iconic coach.
That existence, influencing boys with potential and guiding them to a brighter and a better future while hosting summer clinics and offering paternal advice, is what Dan Hurley saw as his path. For nearly a decade, he went down a version of it, coaching Newark’s St. Benedict’s Prep and building it into an elite national program.
But then he saw players such as J.R. Smith, Tristan Thompson and Lance Thomas go on to more, to push themselves into college and then the NBA, and he reasoned that why exhort his players to reach for the stars yet stay put himself? And a new ambition kicked in.
So, Hurley went to Wagner for a couple of years, then turned Rhode Island into a tournament darling and by then had figured that coaching is just coaching, kind of, admittedly with nuance added and implied, at every level.
When UConn came calling, the Huskies were in the comparative doldrums and far removed from their national title days, but Hurley didn’t try to reinvent anything.
He has taken the same principles, of discipline and movement, solid reasoning, maturity honed but also expected, of tenacity and spirit and synchronized methods and yeah, it seems to be working.
He is incessantly driven because winning games is what gets him up in the morning, and his personality is rubbing off on this team, which is still no-nonsense to its core, but is so confident right now that it is floating around the court.
UConn’s Dan Hurley is ejected
Dan Hurley gets tossed for receiving his second technical foul against Villanova in the first half.
On Saturday, UConn will take on Miami in Houston (8:49 p.m. ET), a week after blowing out Gonzaga in a 28-point shellacking, where Hurley had the game plan and his players were near flawless.
Jordan Hawkins showed why several NBA teams are excited about him and dropped 20 points, Adama Sanogo got physical with Drew Timme, Andre Jackson Jr. was a bucket and a rebound from a triple double and the whole thing was painfully one-sided.
If not for that funny little stretch in January, a burst of conference defeats that Hurley attributes to the strength of the Big East, they might have been the overall No. 1 seed that they’re currently looking like.
Any argument? The evidence was three from the first weekend but far more so during the second. Arkansas, fresh from toppling No. 1 Kansas, was swept aside, 88-65. It was a signal of intent, soon followed by another.
And now onto a Final Four that that looks and feels different, where a 9-seed, Florida Atlantic, lingers, along with a pair of 5s. One of those is UConn’s opponent Miami, with all the favored elites having had their dream squeezed away.
It is part of the magic of March, and if we’re being honest UConn is the only team remaining that truly believed that this might be its destiny.
It has done so because of the quality of the group and the style of their play. But more than anything, because Dan Hurley still wanted to be like his dad, just on a different stage.
