Following a thriller at the Jimmy V Classic against No. 18 Florida, the No. 5 UConn men’s basketball team (9-1) will close out the non-conference portion of the season, hosting Texas on Friday night at the PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford, Conn.
For just the second time this season, the Huskies were at full strength with all 15 players available in Tuesday’s 77-73 win over Florida. It felt different than the first time, especially considering Braylon Mullins was getting his feet wet, and Tarris Reed Jr. was not his usual self on offense.
Mullins has improved one game after another, especially with a 17-point game at Kansas on Dec. 2. Against the defending national champions, the freshman phenom scored 6 points in the second half while foul trouble forced him to play only 11 minutes.
Dan Hurley said following the game on Tuesday that Reed was playing at 75% capacity, but you would not know that after he scored 12 points and grabbed five rebounds on 5-of-10 shooting.
Reed (assuming he plays, no update given after the game on Tuesday), along with backup center Eric Reibe, will have their hands full with Texas center Matas Vokietaitis. The 7-foot center leads the Longhorns in scoring with 15.9 points per game on 67.5% shooting (tied for 11th in the country). The Marijampole, Lithuania native is coming off a career-high 28-point performance in a 95-69 win over Southern on Monday night. In that game, he also tied the program record for most made free throws without a miss in a single game (14).
The Huskies are not as familiar with Vokietaitis as they are with Texas head coach Sean Miller and guards Dailyn Swain, Jordan Pope, Tramon Mark and Simeon Wilcher. The guards combined make up 47.5 of the Longhorns’ 89.1 points per game. Swain has impressed the most out of the group, averaging 15.7 points, 6.9 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.6 steals per game on 56.6% shooting.
Miller has faced Connecticut on several occasions, 10 to be exact. He is 5-5 against the Huskies, including his time at Arizona and Xavier.
“There’s no coach, and there’s no program, that I respect more than UConn and Dan Hurley,” Miller said on a Zoom call Wednesday afternoon. “You know when you play UConn right now, you’re playing one of the best programs in the country, a two-time national champion and a number of people and players that were directly responsible for winning those back-to-back national championships.”
No player on UConn’s roster is more familiar with Miller than Alex Karaban, who had 13 points for the Huskies on Tuesday night. The two-time NCAA champion has played against Miller in every season of his four-year career and has impressed him in every season to date.
“Alex Karaban is one of the great college basketball players of his time,” Miller said. “Not a lot of players are in their fourth year, two-time national champion and Alex has been a fixture on each of those teams. When his time ends at UConn, he’ll go in the rafters as the epitome of a winner.”
Friday night marks the third consecutive season that UConn will face Texas. The Huskies are 2-0 in the current three-season stretch of playing the Longhorns—the title game of the 2023 Empire Classic and a visit to the new Moody Center in Austin, Texas, last season. It is the 11th all-time meeting between the two brand names, with Connecticut holding an 8-3 advantage.
It will be a battle between two top-25 offenses in terms of efficiency. As of writing, UConn is No. 14 in offensive efficiency while Texas is No. 25. The Longhorns have trended in the right direction on offense. In the last five games, they are shooting 52.3% (96th percentile) and have improved their 3-point shooting to 37.5% in comparison to shooting 33.7% on the season. Texas is one of the best teams at getting to the free-throw line, averaging 29.4 free-throw attempts per game (98th percentile). So, do not be surprised that the Longhorns get to the line the way Florida did on Tuesday.
Defensively, Texas is a completely different team in comparison to its offense. The Longhorns have looked especially poor in the last five games, with a defensive rating in the 26th percentile. Overall, Texas’s efficiency on defense is just outside of the top-100 at 103rd in the country. The Longhorns are one of the nation’s worst teams at forcing turnovers, with a turnover percentage of 14.3% (330th in the country).
For the first time since Jan. 10, 2000, Texas will visit Hartford. The last (and only) visit to what was then known as the Hartford Civic Center resulted in a 77-67 win for UConn. The odds are not in the Longhorns’ favor as Hurley holds a 42-9 record in Hartford and has won his last 21 games in the building.
UConn’s record against the SEC is now 10-1 since the 2018-19 season after Tuesday’s win over Florida and can be improved to 11-1 with a win on Friday night.
Tip-off from the PeoplesBank Arena is set for 8 p.m. and will be televised on FOX. Fans are encouraged to coordinate with the seating chart showing which sections wear what color.