I never took Dan Hurley seriously.
I’ve known of the Hurley family. The Hurley family is not new to me. It hasn’t been new to me. The Hurley family has been part of basketball for decades. But in the coaching sphere, it’s been hard to look at Dan and Bobby Hurley and not have a laugh. It’s not that they’ve been bad coaches. It’s just that they’ve been funny coaches, and the expectation for each has never been to reach a point of dominance.
Dan Hurley reached a point of dominance.
The 2022-23 UConn Huskies are not only the national champions. They’re the best team in the country. Clearly and evidently.
Last night was a fitting exclamation mark on a deserving national championship season. Was UConn as good as 2021 Baylor? No. But they were the best team in the country, and yet again last night, they rolled through strong competition to prove that.
It was an odd year for the Huskies, which is to say it was a great year with one bad month. They first took the top spot on KenPom in mid-December, quickly releasing it but hanging around the podium. Even after the sixth of those six losses in eight games, they entered their next game ranked sixth by the system. Once water found its level on these guys, they were always known to be really, really good. Did they win on the road? Not much. They were 6–5 in true road games, and 0–4 in true road games against NCAA Tournament teams. But against every flaw of every other team, a small-sample set of failures—all of which came within the same six-week span—isn’t much. UConn had its weaknesses, but it was the best team in the country.
What stood out about UConn over this tournament was how clearly well-coached they are. It’s easy to get a kick out of Dan Hurley on the sideline, but in both X’s & O’s and the intangibles, he and his staff shined. He’s a great college basketball coach. He’s a worthy national championship coach. Is he better than Mark Few? I wouldn’t go that far. But going forward, he will deservedly be in those sorts of conversations, and he’s earned that. It’s time to take him seriously.
Similarly, it’s time to take UConn seriously. This sounds a little ridiculous, given how great a program Jim Calhoun developed in Storrs, but the last eleven years have been ugly for the Big East’s token state school. They spent seven of them in the American. They spent six of them with Kevin Ollie. They missed the tournament six times in its last ten iterations, and on only one of those occasions did they make the NIT. The last ten years have been the worst ten years you could really draw up for a program that bookended the ten with national championships. They were bad enough that the 2014 title became a little bit of a punchline.
Nobody’s laughing now, except the Huskies themselves, and they’ve earned it. It’s easier to find one great coach than it is to build one great program, and even if you write off Kevin Ollie as lucky (I’m writing off Kevin Ollie as lucky), the Calhoun/Hurley combination having this much success at UConn points towards institutional strength, which should theoretically be easier to replicate under future coaches. I’m not sure what ‘blue blood’ means, but when it comes to college basketball powerhouses, it’s hard to justify placing Duke above Connecticut.
Save Us, Hayden
The Cubs are off to a 1–3 start, and tonight rookie Hayden Wesneski makes his first outing of the year. The short-term situation—the Cubs need a stopper—neatly parallels the long-term situation, which is that the Cubs are going to need someone in this rotation to dramatically overperform reasonable expectations if they’re really going to be a competitive team this year.
At the moment, FanGraphs’s Depth Charts model ranks the Cubs rotation as the ninth-worst in baseball, in terms of production expectations over the remainder of the season. Marcus Stroman and Jameson Taillon and Justin Steele are all expected to be solid, but Brady Singer over in Kansas City is expected to do more than any of those three, and Brady Singer is no playoff ace. With Taillon and Stroman fairly known quantities, that leaves Steele and Wesneski as the upside guys, and the Cubs badly need upside.
There are ways to be competitive with an underwhelming pitching staff. The Cubs lineup isn’t really in that sphere. Unless something happens where both Nick Madrigal and Matt Mervis make the All-Star Game or some similar combination of expected bench/minor leaguers performs similarly, the bats aren’t going to carry this team. They should be fine—it’s not a bad lineup, and it’s strong defensively—but they aren’t going to carry the Cubs.
What the Cubs really need, then, what’s necessary for the Cubs to reach the one scenario where they can reasonably compete, is for Stroman, Taillon, and Drew Smyly to pitch adequately and for Steele and Wesneski to be rock stars. That is hugely unlikely. But it’s the simplest path out there towards this team finishing above .500.
No pressure, kid.
Bulls Scenarios
There are a lot of games remaining that impact the Bulls eventual seed in the Eastern Conference, but for tonight, at least, the Bulls can clinch a spot in the Play-In Tournament with a win against the Hawks or a loss by the Magic against the Cavs. That’s pretty straightforward, and the Bulls will have their chances even if they whiff on both those routes tonight.
Looking beyond that:
From what I understand, the Bulls could rise as high as the 7-seed in theory, but that would require something like the Bulls winning out, the Heat losing three of their final four games, and the Raptors losing at least two of their final four. More realistically, the Bulls could earn the 8-seed by passing the Hawks and the Raptors. If the Bulls win tonight, they’ll hold the head-to-head over the Hawks. The Raptors hold the head-to-head over the Bulls, but if the tie is a three-way tie, I believe the Bulls would finish first among the three (if my sources are correct, the Bulls are 4–3 against the others, the Raptors are 3–3, and the Hawks are 3–4).
That Raptors are huge favorites against the Hornets, so there isn’t much hope for catching them tonight, but from here the Raptors go to Boston for a pair before finishing the regular season at home against the Bucks, while the Bulls visit the Bucks and Mavericks before hosting the Pistons. Passing the Raptors and lowering the number of necessary wins within the Play-In Tournament to one is possible. But the win tonight is probably necessary to keep it that way.
