UCONN Men’s Exhibition Game

Well this week marked the first games of the exhibition season for the UCONN men’s and women’s basketball team. So like I have been doing with football, I will provide a little blurb about the game and then some observations.

First up is the men’s report. The UCONN men took on American International College on Wednesday night at Gampel Pavilion and defeated them by a final score of 75-59. The final score was not indicative of how close the game actually was as the Huskies were losing at half time. The Huskies played sloppy basketball and as usual Coach Calhoun was screaming at his players.
Notes and Observations from the game:

• Nine Huskies made their debuts in the game including AJ Price, who led the Huskies with 17 pts
• The starting lineup was AJ Price, Craig Austrie, Marcus Johnson, Hasheem Thabeet, and Jeff Adrien.
• Hasheem Thabeet scored 11 pts, had 8 rebounds and 7 blocks. If he stays in school for 3 yrs, I think he will challenge Emeka Okafor’s records for career blocks and single season blocks.
• UCONN was outrebounded by a smaller AIC team in the first half. With UCONN’s size in the frontcourt, this should have never happened.
• After a poorly played first half, The Huskies kept AIC scoreless for about 10 minutes of the second half.

In a nutshell, it was a poorly played and executed game for the Huskies. As a young team, they will need to use this experience as a building block to get back to playing Huskie basketball. Some quotes from Jim Calhoun:

“We did what young kids do. We threw the ball away, didn’t rebound, fouled like crazy, couldn’t make gimmies. Some of this I knew, some of this I didn’t know. I knew it would be a teaching process…I didn’t think we would get outrebounded by a smaller team.”

“Overall, how would I grade it? I give it a D-minus.”