LAWRENCE, Kansas – Tristen Newton, leading into Friday’s matchup with No. 5 Kansas, expressed how much he loves road games. “Taking the joy,” as he put it Wednesday, was nearly impossible in the Jayhawks’ historic Allen Fieldhouse.
UConn was one shot away from pulling it off. The Huskies trailed for 33 minutes and 44 seconds but, thanks to Newton’s 31 points, had a chance to tie the game with a layup in the final 10 seconds. The graduate point guard passed the ball off to a hobbled Cam Spencer for a potential game-winner from 3 but it missed off the rim.
Kansas (7-1) sealed the game with a pair of free throws, 69-65, in a battle between the last two national champions that certainly lived up to the hype.
The crowd noise in the sold-out arena acted as a sixth, maybe even seventh Jayhawks’ defender for nearly the entire game. UConn (7-1) struggled to run its sets as 7-foot-2 All-American Hunter Dickinson served as a massive roadblock clogging the lane, forcing the Huskies to spend most of their time looking for shots around the perimeter.
Dickinson finished with 15, K.J. Adams had 18 and Kevin McCullar Jr. scored 11 points in the second half and led the Jayhawks with 21 on 6 of 10 shooting.
“I wish we would’ve played better,” UConn head coach Dan Hurley said. “Credit their team for that, credit the environment. It really knocked us on our heels. We don’t go to many places this organized with fan involvement, so it was a heck of an environment and I think it rattled us for awhile.”
But Newton, who starred in front of a mixed crowd of 75,000 in last year’s national championship game, kept the Huskies from drowning with a game-high 16 points at halftime on 4 of 5 shooting from 3-point range. He finished shooting 10 of 18 from the field, 6 of 9 from beyond the arc. His 31 points were the most he’s scored in a UConn uniform; his career-high, 32, came against Tulane in his final season at East Carolina.
“Tristen carried us tonight. That was a virtuoso performance,” Hurley said. “I thought the program and our guys showed a champion’s heart by putting us in position to have a 3 to steal it and get out of here with a win.”
Alex Karaban fouled out with less than two minutes left; he was second on the team with 10 points on 4 of 11 shooting. Spencer, who came into the game with a foot injury and aggravated his other foot early on, gutted his way through 36 minutes but couldn’t get his shot to fall, finishing 2 of 12 from the field and 1 of 7 from deep.
Sophomore center Donovan Clingan, in a much-anticipated matchup with Dickinson, had eight points (3 of 6) with six rebounds and three blocks.
“I was super excited for this matchup, he’s a great player,” Dickinson said. “He’s obviously a very big human and they use him in a lot of good sets, they utilize his size a lot down there so he puts a lot of pressure on the defense. I was trying to make his catches as far as possible and try to make him a little bit less effective, but he’s a great player so he’s gonna get some touches down there for sure.”
UConn almost never trailed through its first seven games but found itself down 11 after a 10-0 run from the Jayhawks in the early going, ended by a deep 3-pointer for Newton from the tailfeathers of the center court logo.
“They struggled shooting (coming into the game), McCullar was the one guy that we were really worried about, so really the plan was to go under everything with them. But we were so soft on the ball,” Hurley said of UConn’s defense to start the game. “I think we might’ve screwed our guys up tonight by being a little bit too soft, they threw it wherever they wanted, they played too tight to the 3-point line. I think we had a lot to do with the slow start.”
Kansas built its lead to 23-12 before Hassan Diarra and Karaban hit on back-to-back threes and cut it to five.
But the shots continued to fall for the Jayhawks, who made 10 of their first 14 from the field, including the first four 3-point attempts. UConn’s defense picked up to close the half and held Kansas scoreless for the final 2:14, while Newton went on a personal 5-0 run to cut UConn’s deficit to seven at the midway point, the score 38-31.
“We’ve been in the national championship game so I feel like no crowd can really faze us,” Newton said. “I’ve been in college for five years so I’ve been a part of games like this, especially with UConn I’ve been part of a lot of games like this. I don’t think the crowd really affected us, we just have to come out better as a team and more aggressive.”
The UConn contingent of fans in the top corner of the fieldhouse behind the Huskies’ bench made itself heard after Spencer made his first shot of the game, making it a two-point contest in the opening minutes of the second half. Huskies’ fans were loud in spurts, but their noise was consistently answered by an eruption from the home supporters.
After winning a record 24-straight nonconference games by double-digits, Hurley and the Huskies finally found themselves in a close game.
Newton beat the shot clock buzzer with a 3-pointer that gave UConn its first lead of the game, 47-46, at the 10:36 mark in the second half. The graduate guard hit another from deep to put the Huskies up 50-47 with 10 minutes left to play.
Actor Jason Sudeikis, known for his role as Ted Lasso, hopped into the Kansas pep band in an effort to drum up some momentum with the home crowd after Samson Johnson flushed an alley-oop pass from Newton. It worked – McCullar Jr. and Dickinson helped the Jayhawks regain the lead with a trio of 3-pointers amidst an 14-0 run that pushed the score to 61-54 with four minutes left. McCullar delivered the knockout punch, a corner 3-pointer, that made it 66-60 with a minute to go.
The Huskies return to Madison Square Garden for another challenge against North Carolina in Tuesday’s Jimmy V Classic, and, after hosting Arkansas Pine Bluff Dec. 9, will fly out to Seattle for Gonzaga.
“Our expectation was that tonight’s game was going to be really, really hard,” Hurley said. “There’s not many teams in the country, in this type of a showdown, a Friday night game, that would have a chance to come in here and win it. But when you’re a top-tier program and a big brand and a blue-blood and a national champion, you owe it to college basketball, you owe it to your fans, you owe it to the sport to go play these types of games in the nonconference.”
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