The Horns seek defensive improvement against the Huskies.
When Texas Longhorns head coach Sean Miller steps onto the court at PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford on Friday before his team takes on the No. 5 UConn Huskies, he’ll have a sense of deja vu.
He’ll be wearing different colors, but the environment will feel familiar from his days in the Big East, as will the opposing coach, Dan Hurley, a frequent nemesis over those years.
Beyond that, Miller may find himself wondering what the hell he’s doing there, a frequent refrain with the schedule he inherited in his first year at Texas, ranging from opening the season against Duke in Charlotte to traveling to Maui Invitational.
“Look, if you’re going to schedule UConn, you better be real good,” Miller said on Monday. “You better have a great team. You better have an experienced team. You’re like, look, we can win the national championship. Everything is good. It makes zero sense to play that game home and away and pick them as a game if you don’t feel that way.”
Miller didn’t pick this game, and he certainly doesn’t feel like he has a quality team after getting blown out by Virginia at home last week, prompting long discourses about the problems on defense. A regular refrain for Miller since preseason practice has been about the ravages of time working against the Longhorns.
At top of mind now — Rick Pitino telling a young Miller at a basketball camp that “fouling negates hustle.”
“The unfortunate part of defense is you’re only as strong as your weakest link, and at the end of the clock when a guy jumps for no reason and fouls the offensive player, all that effort that you saw through 23 seconds is negated, and we just have too many plays like that,” Miller said.
“It’s up to me as the coach to improve our team in that fouling and whether it be a breakdown on or off the ball. We just have to keep coaching it and coaching it and incrementally get better.”
To have a chance on the road against a top-five team with an 87-percent win probability, Miller knows that the Longhorns have to avoid the game-defining runs that the Huskies often use to bury opponents. Despite only averaging 10.3 fast-break points per contest thanks to an adjusted tempo that ranks around the 20th percentile, UConn tends to break games open by using their defense to produce transition opportunities as they hunt threes.
“Got to run good offense, got to take care of the ball, and you have to get back — you can’t allow them to create those opportunities in transition,” Miller said.
Defending Hurley’s offense in the half court is an exercise in maintaining intensity against complex actions that involve regular off-ball screens, including staggers, pin-downs, and zoom actions as the Huskies space the court and attack weak defenders.
“A lot like Virginia, they break you in the last 10 seconds. In transition, it’s fast. In the half court, it’s super slow, it’s deliberate, a lot of screening, and really what they can do is, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. They have the ability in their half court to pick on a guy who can’t do it and and that guy oftentimes lets his team down,” Miller said.
For a Texas team with a weak individual defender in senior guard Jordan Pope who averages 27.5 minutes per game, that’s a scary proposition against the No. 8 offense in adjusted efficiency that produces assists at the 31st-highest rate nationally.
Where the Horns could find some margins are in the average three-point shooting and free-throw shooting of this Huskies team or the ability to sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis to draw fouls and get Texas to the line and into the bonus — UConn ranks 276h in opposing free-throw rate, although Hurley does have some big bodies to throw at the 7’0, 255-pounder.
“On defense they play with amazing effort, they will foul, they will block shots, they will get steals. And you just you have to be able to take care of the ball against their pressure, especially on their home court,” Miller said.
A well-balanced team, the Huskies also rank in the top 10 in adjusted defensive efficiency with a top-20 block rate even as they hold opponents to 26.8-percent from beyond the arc, 12th nationally.
Last year, Texas fell to No. 25 UConn 75-65 in Austin after getting beat by 18 points in the first half and allowing a big performance by Huskies forward Alex Karaban scored 21 points with 11 rebounds, four assists, two steals, and two blocks.
“I think he’s one of the great college basketball players of his time,” Miller said.
Guard Solo Ball added 16 points in what became a breakout season for the Virginia product, now complemented in the backcourt by Georgia transfer Silas Demery Jr., who is a three-point threat so far this season, but has run the offense effectively with an elite 33.7-percent assist rate and effective shooting from inside the arc.
“He’s just got a great physical presence and strong body. Can really score from two and I think gives you that physicality at the point guard that maybe they didn’t have as much a year ago,” Miller said of Demery.
For the Texas head coach, a lot of the discussion surrounding his team is about incremental progress as he continually expresses his frustration with a schedule that has already exposed the Longhorns at multiple points of the young season.
“When you play a team like UConn, your room for error is very little and marginal, but I know this, that it’s a great test for us. It’s a great test to see if we’ve improved in that really important effort of being able to play with much more force and competitive spirit from start to finish, especially on the defensive end,” Miller said.
Tip is at 7 p.m. Central on FOX.
Category: General Sports
