St. John’s Delivered A Truly Unholy Second Half Of Basketball

The Athletic, your new home for the Washington Post's former sports section, delivered 2,600 words on Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley Wednesday morning, largely on the theme of Mellowing Madman. Hurley's history as the man who smuggles wasp hives in his gym shorts and then waits for someone to brush against him by accident precedes, defines, and explains him; a shorter way of saying this is that he is "from New Jersey," but there's not much in the way of imagery there. If Hurley's personal growth was the pregame sell for UConn's Wednesday night home game with rival St. John's, the audience got hosed. This was the easiest high-profile game his hair-trigger shall ever have to navigate.

It's hard to say if the Athletic story was entirely convincing, given that he is still a piece of work in progress, but Hurley was downright zen in the sixth-ranked Huskies' pre-tournament showdown with 15th-ranked St. John's. He had no choice but to be; when the opponent chooses to make no shots whatsoever for nearly all of the second half, what's a barely hinged martinet to do but bite a hole in his chin—tightly wrapped coaches can indeed bite their own faces when properly provoked—and walk away confused but worryingly chill. He almost looked haunted.

UConn won, 72-40, and that final score flatters the Johnnies, who entered the game having won their last 13 consecutive games and had that NCAA four-seed look about them. And then, as they say within the royal family, the shit went bad. Monumentally bad. Galactically and nearly historically bad. And after awhile, laughably bad.