For the fourth straight year, the UConn men’s basketball team (17-8, 9-5 Big East) lost to the Seton Hall Pirates (7-18, 2-12 Big East) at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. The Huskies were 14-point favorites to win the contest and end the curse of The Rock.
“I feel like in the end, we got what we deserved,” UConn head coach Dan Hurley said while opening his postgame press conference.
Samson Johnson won the tip for the Huskies, but neither team could buy a basket for the first 2:58, with Johnson’s layup breaking a scoreless drought.
The Pirates came into the game after losing nine straight games and had nothing else to lose, which was clear for the first 12 minutes of the game.
That would continue out of the media timeout, with the Pirates going on a 7-0 run to lead by four and forcing Hurley to use a timeout.
“It took us a while to get control of the game,” Hurley said. “[We] should have won it in regulation [and] should have won it in overtime.”
Alex Karaban continued his struggles from deep in the first half, missing his first two shots from downtown and had not made a shot from three-point range in his last 14 attempts. The last time he made a three-pointer was in the second half of the Huskies’ upset win at Marquette.
Seton Hall led 25-22 at halftime, holding the Huskies to their fewest first-half points since 2022. It is the 10th time this season that UConn has trailed at the half. Both of Connecticut’s three-pointers came from Solo Ball, who tied the game-high at the midway point with eight points.
Karaban’s drought from deep got to 16 straight misses before burying a deep three-pointer toward the end of the shot clock with 10:15 left in regulation. For the first time in what seemed like forever, Karaban led the team in scoring with 20 points.
“I was supposed to be doing that for the past month,” Karaban said. “So yeah, it feels good to snap out of it, but I’d rather miss all those shots and win the game. I’d rather stay cold and stay in this slump but win the game.”
Johnson’s poster dunk brought the Huskies within one point and Ball’s third three-pointer of the game put UConn up 39-37 with 8:27 left, forcing Shaheen Holloway to call timeout.
An 8-0 run headlined by Liam McNeeley and Karaban making three-pointers brought the Huskies lead to 55-48 with 1:42 to play, forcing Holloway to call another timeout.
UConn was up 58-55 with the ball before McNeeley fell and the Huskies could not inbound the ball, resulting in a five-second violation. Dylan Addae-Wusu, who missed the last eight games, drilled a three-pointer to tie the game and force overtime. He scored 13 points, including the Pirates’ final 10 points in regulation. Isaiah Coleman led all scorers with 23 points.
Seton Hall scored the game’s final six points as Connecticut turned the ball over three times in the final 59 seconds of overtime. Despite successfully inbounding the ball after a fiasco of press break failures, Garwey Dual forced Ball to turn the ball over and allowed Seton Hall to have a chance to win. Scotty Middleton put back his own miss to put the Pirates in front with three seconds to go.
“We knew they would pressure us,” Karaban said. “We knew they would get after us and really try to rough up the game, but it’s all on us. We were soft on defense; we were soft on offense. We did everything soft. We put ourselves in that hole and we just never turned it up to the level that we needed to.
Hassan Diarra tried a Hail Mary shot from halfcourt but was not successful. UConn lost while shooting a season-low 37.3% from the floor, making it four straight games under 40% from the field. Their shooting has not been superb, but the more glaring problem may be their inbounding as teams will look at the tape from Saturday’s game.
The last time a team outside the top 200 on KenPom beat the Huskies was on Nov. 13, 2019, when 218th-ranked Saint Joseph’s shocked UConn at Harry A. Gampel Pavilion.
According to CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander, it is the first time a reigning national champion lost to a team at least 12 games below .500 entering the game since 7-19 USC upset then-11th-ranked Arizona 91-90 in overtime on March 5, 1998.
The Huskies will have a chance to redeem themselves on Tuesday night as they host Villanova at the XL Center in Hartford, Conn.