LAHAINA, Hawaii — If you thought you might’ve heard a tremor across the Pacific Ocean in the middle of the night, you were right.
It was after 2:30 a.m. on the East Coast, officially, when UConn’s reign of dominance atop college basketball ended. The most intimidating program from the past two seasons has been stripped of its powers. The school that took one nonconference loss the past two seasons managed to TRIPLE that number in three days’ time at the Maui Invitational. It’s the most stunning development in all of American sports this month … and maybe in the past six months.
“Right now we’re a shell of who we’ve been,” Dan Hurley said after his No. 2 Huskies were beaten 85-67 by Dayton on Wednesday night in Maui in the seventh place game of the tourney.
“The burden of wearing a uniform after back-to-backs, right now, looks like it’s weighing heavy on the group,” Hurley said.
The 18-point differential is UConn’s worst loss to a nonconference opponent since 2018, when Connecticut was defeated by Iowa by 19 in Hurley’s first season with the Huskies.
UConn’s the first team since Louisville in 1986-87 to lose three games in three days as a top-two team. Like UConn, that Louisville group was a reigning champion; it took its loss at the Great Alaska Shootout. The Huskies are the first top-two team in the polls to lose three straight games to unranked teams since No. 2 Arizona in 2017. The Wildcats team infamously ffell out of the AP poll entirely the following week, marking the first time a team had ever gone from top-two to unranked in a week.
Connecticut will suffer the same fate. It’s also down to 28th at KenPom after sitting at No. 4 two weeks ago. The program hasn’t been ranked this low since March of 2021.
For Dayton, some validation and a sorely needed win to give some nonconference cred to its docket. The Flyers earned their first win against a top-two AP opponent since 1974 (against Notre Dame) and looked unfazed following two gut-punching losses. Earlier this week, Anthony Grant’s team blew a 21-point lead against UNC and a nine-point edge against Iowa State. UConn did not have the defense or the shooting to spook Dayton a third night in a row. The Flyers’ offense was humming.
“Offensively, we’ll be fine. Defensively, though, man, it’s been a disaster here for us,” Hurley said. His team gave up 99 in an overtime loss to Memphis, then allowed Colorado to score 1.20 points per possession in Tuesday’s 73-72 loss before Dayton uncorked 1.31 PPP on the Huskies, boosted by 27-of-30 shooting at the foul line.
Hurley was not nearly as admonishing of the officials Wednesday as he was the previous two days, but he allude to the overall free throw discrepancy (UConn was 7 for 11). There’s no excuses to be made: UConn didn’t prepare well enough and got thoroughly exposed in a loaded field and now all the shine from the past two seasons has worn off. Losing four NBA players caught up to the Huskies in a hurry, and playing three games in less than 72 hours did not help matters whatsoever.
“When you come to a tournament like this and it’s three games in three days and it starts to go bad, there’s no way of fixing it because there’s no time to,” Hurley said.
It was unthinkable that UConn would leave Maui without at LEAST one win. Instead, it’s desperately searching to get right … and it has to play low-level UMES on Saturday night before hosting Baylor next week.
“We need to regroup both from a psyche standpoint and then come up with a different plan defensively,” Hurley said.
It needs to be ASAP. UConn has Baylor, at Texas, vs. Gonzaga at MSG and home to Xavier over a four-game stretch in December. If big fixes don’t happen in the next two weeks, these Huskies will suffer the same fate as the last two-time champ: Florida wound up going to the NIT in 2008.
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Tigers’ two bigs at center of team’s reason for success
Auburn has its first Maui Invitational championship in school history. The fourth-ranked Tigers beat upset-minded Memphis 90-76 in the championship Wednesday, solidifying their status as the team with the best résumé (much more in that column linked there) in college basketball heading into December. Auburn defeated Houston earlier this month, and just beat No. 5 Iowa State, No. 12 North Carolina and increasingly good Memphis over the span of three days in the islands.
There are hundreds of factors that go into building a really good team. Auburn’s a really good team. Probably on its way to being a great one. One of the most important factors is genuine trust and encouragement between teammates. Jealousy and friction can be the hidden things that tear away at a group’s potential.
Which brings me to player of the year frontrunner Johni Broome and his teammate, fellow big man Dylan Cardwell. Cardwell is as Auburn as it gets. Last season, Bruce Pearl sat in his office with me and raved about Cardwell. He could have transferred basically at any point if he wanted, considering how he previously took a back seat to Jabari Smith, Walker Kessler and Broome. Instead, he’s going to log five seasons on The Plains and leave as one of the more beloved players in school history.
He wasn’t always so keen to be this way, though.
“A year ago pretty much this week, Johni and I became friends,” Cardwell told CBS Sports.
That’s right: Cardwell wasn’t a fan of Broome for a long time. He saw him not as a teammate, but as the next player to hold back his opportunity. At first, he was resistant to be buddies with Broome. Keep in mind the pressure on college guys to maximize every minute of their careers, pushing toward trying to make it as a professional basketball players. This environment invariably breeds insecurities and intra-team squabbles. Cardwell essentially gave Broome a cold shoulder after Broome transferred from Morehead State in 2022.
“The first year he was here, I looked at him as an opponent rather than my teammate, and that kind of showed on the court,” Cardwell said. “I wasn’t cheering for him. I wasn’t really happy for him as I should have been.”
But on Nov. 29, 2023, Cardwell decided to drop the resentment. Auburn was playing against Virginia Tech. Before the game, Cardwell said he prayed for Broome to play well for the first time. Broome went on to score a then-career-high 30 points in an Auburn uniform. At the same time, Cardwell only played 12 minutes in the 74-57 win.
“The Lord gave me an option,” Cardwell said. “He’s like, you can either be happy that my prayer was answered or I could be stingy that my teammate went off for 30.”
He chose happiness. Broome, in kind, was cheering him on, loudly, in the arena.
“I realized that he was not my opposition but he was a brother and he was a teammate, and that’s something that coach Pearl has been telling us since we got here,” Cardwell continued. “I’m going to bring in guys that you’re going to love on that are going to be there for you for the rest of your life. The guys in the locker room are not the opponent, and that’s what you see today. We have so many guys that are happy for one another rather than looking at them as competition, and I feel like once I let my pride go and I let that go, Johni and I’s relationship really took off.”
In my 15-plus seasons of covering college basketball, Cardwell’s response is on the short list of the most honest and transparent things I’ve ever heard a player admit to at a postgame press conference. I think Cardwell and Broome’s connection is the biggest key to Auburn winning the SEC and making a Final Four run.
“You just wouldn’t believe how eloquently he did that,” Pearl said of Cardwell’s growth. “When Johni decided to come back, we knew we could have a chance to have a really good team, and one of the things that Dylan and I talked about his coming back was not playing behind Johni but playing with him.”
Cardwell and Broome wanted to make playing with two bigs — a counter to current basketball tendencies — a viable path to success. Pearl was on board, to an extent. They tinkered and tracked practice logs and monitored. Nothing was guaranteed. Auburn wasn’t playing fast enough at first. But it’s working.
The Broome/Cardwell duo has played 27% of team’s minutes together, and they’re the second-best duo on the team (+51 points per 100 possessions), according to EvanMiya.com.
“These guys are loving playing together,” Pearl said. “They were never on the floor together very much in the last couple years, so it’s just incredible. They’ve got great chemistry. They trust each other. They listen to each other.”
As a result, Auburn is building out a case of having one of the strongest, most intimidating 1-2 big-man duos in college hoops. We get to see that tested in six days, when the Tigers face No. 11 Duke to face Cooper Flagg and Khaman Maluach. Tremendous.
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Michigan State-UNC yet another riveting Maui affair
Despite not having freshman Jase Richardson (lingering headache after taking an elbow against Memphis pm Tuesday) and despite giving up a seven-point lead with less than three minutes to go, Michigan State wiggled its way to a 94-91 overtime win against UNC. It took third here in Maui.
It was the sixth really good/great game of this year’s event out of the 12 that were played. The environment in the LCC was electric. Tom Izzo and Hubert Davis looked like they were coaching in the NCAA Tournament. Once UNC found a way to push it to OT — thanks to a huge 3 from Seth Trimble, who’s coming along really well in his junior season — it felt like they could hear us all the way to Honolulu. This place is special.
Izzo, who sometimes refers to himself as “Dr. Negative,” decided to be exceedingly optimistic in the huddle down the stretch and in OT, an MSU source told me. It struck the right tone in a tense game.
Spartans guard Tre Holloman had a career-high 19 points. Sitting on press row, his competitiveness was clearly contagious. Whatever he did to amp himself for this game worked; no Richardson gave him a window to capitalize on. Wasn’t just him, though. MSU had six in double figures. Maybe this team is getting into its identity.
The result also meant a lot. This was a rematch from the second round of last season’s NCAA Tournament. In case you you forgot, UNC won that without issue, breezing to an 85-69 win. A much different game Wednesday night.
So, MSU is leaving with a 2-1 record here and UNC is 1-2 the last three days.
The Spartans are 6-2 and have their first top-80 KenPom win. They had to eke it out, but they got it. To leave here without a notable victory would’ve been a baaaaad look after falling to Kansas and Memphis previously.
UNC? Had it not rallied from 21 down against Dayton, it might have been 0-3 instead of UConn. (Well, maybe not.) Yet again, the Tar Heels got off to a slow start. It’s a pattern at this point and an infliction on UNC’s potential. As is the issue in the middle. The Tar Heels did not land a highly chased big man in the portal last offseason, instead settling to go with slender 6-10 junior Jalen Washington. Michigan State’s Xavier Booker (12 points, seven rebounds) was able to get some looks he has been hunting for this season, which was as encouraging for the Spartans as it was sobering for North Carolina. Davis may have to go all-in on super-duper up-tempo and small-small ball to try and counter against other teams.
This is a raise-your-eyebrows quote from Izzo about RJ Davis, Elliot Cadeau and Trimble: “That is a very good basketball team we played. Right now those three guards might be the best three-guard tandem I’ve ever seen, and I mean that.”
Carolina did schedule that road game against Hawaii (on Oahu) a few days before heading to Maui, but I don’t think that was a factor. UNC was a moving target headed into the season and I don’t think Maui offered much more clarity on how good, or not, this team is.
Iowa State salvages two wins after opening-round loss
It took until game No. 9 of the Maui Invitational, but we finally got a blowout. No. 5 Iowa State crushed Colorado 99-71 Wednesday in the opening game on the final day of the tournament.
That means the Cyclones finish in fifth place in the bracket. TJ Otzelberger’s team flies back home across the Pacific after going 2-1 on the island and is 5-1 overall. Their wins over Dayton and Colorado are TBD in terms of value, but a 28-point victory vs. the Buffaloes should boost them heading into next week. They’ll need it.
ISU’s next game is Dec. 4 at home against No. 10 Marquette.
Cyclones sophomore Milan Momcilovic had a game-high 24 points, while Curtis Jones added 15, Keshon Gilbert 14 and three other players had 10. Otzelberger took the Iowa State job in 2021 but Wednesday marked only the second time the Cyclones scored more than 90 points against a high-major opponent. (The other one was also 99, but vs. DePaul, so it barely qualifies, really.)
The Clones, for the first time under Otzelberger, could have a top-level offense.
“We have a team that it’s really difficult to prepare for because we’re going to end up with five, six guys in double figures that any night, one of them could be the guy,” Otzelberger said. “We’re trying to play more in transition. We’re trying to play with more pace.”
To think: ISU flirted with losing to Dayton and would’ve had to play UConn for seventh place in the last game of the tournament if it didn’t win Tuesday. That’s a wild swing. I had the Cyclones outside of the top 20 heading into the season, which was a contrarian take and, I think it’s fair to say now, almost certainly the wrong one.
For the Buffs, if I’d have given Colorado coach Tad Boyle the option of taking 1-2 or chancing going 0-3 in Maui, I think he’d have taken 1-2, especially with a win over UConn.
“We went from the outhouse to the penthouse back to the outhouse in three days,” Boyle said.
The Buffs had to replace their top five scorers and are a wait-and-see when it comes to their Big 12 viability. I like what they have in shooting guard Julian Hammond, 6-10 post man (and NAIA transfer) Elijah Malone and 6-8 wing Andrej Jakimovski.
Given this was Colorado’s third game in three days, it’s all but a guarantee the next time these teams play it won’t be nearly the blowout. ISU travels to play Colorado in Big 12 play in just over a month, on Dec. 30.
“I told myself before the season started I have to have patience with this group,” Boyle said. “It’s not in my nature, but it’s where we are right now.”
And at least we have this video of Boyle water sliding. I never found a water slide during my time out here in Maui, and that’s on me.
Let’s tour the Lahaina Civic Center
Over the decades, as I’ve watched this amazing tournament on TV, I’ve always wondered what it felt like and what the confines were around the hallowed Lahaina Civic Center. So I took it upon myself to shoot a couple of videos and bring you in. Until you see it, you don’t quite realize just how cozy this place is.
As for the locker rooms, well, there’s nothing like this in sports. You’ve gotta see this most humble of pregame prep spaces. It doesn’t get more bare-bones than this. Ah, Maui. Big games in a small gym. Only college basketball provides something this wholesome.
One parting thought: It was a personal highlight of my career to get to fly out here and finally cover this event. To do so after the 2023 wildfires forced the Invitational to Honolulu last season, and to have this one returning, but without Bill Walton, made it all the more poignant. The Aloha Spirit lives on in Hawaiian people. You feel wherever you go. It’s in them, it’s in the air. It’s why so many are drawn back to this beautiful place. This is the best annual college sports event not named March Madness that we get. Its future is somewhat hazy, but I believe the Invitational is going to power through and maintain its place, even if it comes in different forms later this decade.
I’ll have a column on that soon. Thanks for following along this week. Mahalo!
