Big East Basketball

Five-star small forward prospect Liam McNeeley has committed to UConn, he told ESPN's Jonathan Givony.

McNeeley is ranked as the No. 16 prospect overall and No. 3 positionally by 247Sports.

He is additionally ranked as the nation's No. 9 prospect by ESPN.

"It felt like a perfect fit," McNeeley said, per Givony. "There's no reason we can't contend for a three-peat."

McNeeley is a five-star recruit out of Montverde Academy in Florida.

He also considered other schools including Kansas, Kentucky, Houston and Michigan, according to Gary Bedore of the Kansas City Star.

McNeeley was previously committed to Indiana but requested a release in March, per Travis Branham of 247Sports.

His decommitment from the Hoosiers followed the news that head coach Mike Woodson would return to coach a fourth season in 2024-25.

McNeeley will now join Ahmad Nowell and Isaiah Abraham, both four-star prospects, in the 2024 class of UConn commits.

His commitment marks a recruiting victory for Dan Hurley and UConn after the Huskies missed out on top recruit Cooper Flagg, McNeeley's teammate at Montverde.

Flagg visited UConn but ended up choosing Duke in what his father Ralph said on social media was an extremely close decision.

That Montverde connection 💥

Liam McNeeley and Cooper Flagg connect for the alley-oop jam!

Watch @JordanClassic on the NBA App: https://t.co/nEfAkhCtXB pic.twitter.com/Acjz6wXGfc

— NBA Future Starts Now (@nbafuturenow) April 22, 2024

UConn was apparently more successful in the school's recruiting visit with McNeeley, who visited Storrs on Monday and Tuesday, per David Borges of CT Insider.

The Huskies were interested in McNeeley prior to his visit because they saw him as a player similar to Alex Karaban, who ranked as one of the 2023-24 team's strongest perimeter shooters while making 5.5 attempts from deep per game, Fox Sports' John Fanta reported.

McNeeley averaged 12.5 points, 3.8 rebounds and 2.8 assists through 33 games in his senior season with Montverde.

He established himself one of high school's strongest three-point shooters by going 68-for-155 (43.9 percent) from deep during Montverde's undefeated season.

UConn is looking to defend back-to-back national titles by rebuilding a roster that could be set to lose all five championship starters, including NBA draft candidates Stephon Castle and Donovan Clingan.

McNeeley could have the chance to make a bid for a spot in the new starting lineup if the elite perimeter shooting he demonstrated in Florida translates to the Big East.

Michigan forward Tarris Reed is headed to UConn.

Reed told Joe Tipton of On3 that he plans on transferring to play for the back-to-back national champions.

"I chose UConn for its winning culture, commitment to player development and coaching style," Reed said. "Coach Hurley's tough coaching style is known for pushing players into uncomfortable situations, making the uncomfortable seem comfortable. UConn provides the ideal setting and coaching for me to maximize my potential both on and off the court."

Reed averaged 9.0 points, 7.2 rebounds and 1.4 blocks per game as a sophomore at Michigan. He was originally a 4-star recruit coming out of high school and again as a transfer by 247Sports.

UConn already signed guard Ahmad Nowell and forward Isaiah Abraham to its 2024 recruiting class. The Huskies will have to work quickly to replace guard Stephon Castle and center Donovan Clingan, who are expected to be lottery picks in the 2024 NBA draft. Forward Alex Karaban could also declare.

Reed could wind up replacing Clingan if he winds up playing center for Huskies coach Dan Hurley. The 6'10" big man is a little smaller than Clingan's 7'2" frame, but the only other player who could compete is the similarly sized Youssouf Singare.

The NBA could be a future destination for UConn men's basketball coach Dan Hurley, although it doesn't appear to be on his radar currently.

Mike Anthony of CTInsider reported that Hurley said that UConn is "the only place he'll ever coach college basketball" but that he wouldn't rule out becoming an NBA coach "way down the road."

Dan Hurley says the only place he’ll ever coach college basketball is at UConn.
He doesn’t rule out trying the NBA “way down the road.”

— Mike Anthony (@ManthonyHearst) April 13, 2024

Hurley just finished his sixth season as head coach of the Huskies and led the program to its second consecutive National Championship. He has compiled a 141-58 record with UConn and was named Naismith Coach of the Year for the 2023-24 season.

Hurley was a name floated for the recent Kentucky vacancy, but he told Dan Dakich of OutKick that he shut down the Wildcats' pursuit quickly.

"I told them very early on, I have no interest. My wife, my family, we have no interest," Hurley said. "Why would you leave the current best program in the country to go somewhere else?"

He also told John Fanta of Fox Sports that he currently "has his mind set on pursuing a national championship three-peat." This hasn't happened since UCLA in the 1960s and 70s, when the program won seven consecutive and 10 in 12 seasons. Otherwise, no other program has won at least three consecutive championships.

UConn will have a difficult time doing so, considering how rare the feat is, but Hurley has the program in tremendous shape. It has reached four consecutive NCAA Tournaments and earned the No. 1 overall seed in this year's tournament.

While losing Donovan Clingan and potentially Stephon Castle to the NBA will be a blow to UConn in 2024-25, the program still has a top-30 recruiting class for 2024, per 247 Sports.

Determining when it's time to leave will be something only Hurley can figure out. However, the possibility of him leading a team to an NBA Championship at least exists in the future.

After winning their second straight national championship and sixth in program history, the UConn Huskies are in store for another celebration.

According to Courtney Ingalls of WTNH 8 in Connecticut, Gov. Ned Lamont announced Tuesday that the city of Hartford will host a victory parade for the Huskies on Saturday starting at 11 a.m. ET.

The parade will begin at the State Capitol building and will be followed by a rally outside the XL Center at 11:30 a.m. ET where players, coaches and other guests will be invited to speak.

Fans can check their local listings for broadcast information regarding the parade. Details about a live stream have not yet been made available.

"For the second year in a row, the UConn men's basketball team wowed the nation by dominating the NCAA tournament, and now it's time for Connecticut to give them the victory celebration they deserve," Gov. Lamont said. "I urge basketball fans from all over Connecticut to come to Hartford on Saturday morning and show the Huskies how much this team means to our state and how proud we are of their accomplishments."

UConn became the first team since Florida in 2006 and 2007 to win back-to-back national titles by defeating Purdue 75-60 on Monday night. The only other programs to ever win consecutive championships are John Wooden's UCLA teams in the 1960s and 1970s and Duke in 1991 and 1992.

The Huskies overcame a 37-point, 10-rebound performance by Boilermakers star and two-time Naismith Player of the Year Zach Edey to secure their second straight title.

UConn senior point guard Tristen Newton was named the Most Outstanding Player of the 2024 NCAA Tournament after leading the team with 20 points and seven assists in Monday's victory. He averaged 14.5 points and 7.2 assists through six tournament games.

The Huskies and their fans will certainly enjoy Saturday's celebration, as UConn is now in rare air as back-to-back champions.

Being the coach's son does have some benefits.

When UConn needed to dribble out the shot clock toward the end of Tuesday's 75-60 win over Purdue, head coach Dan Hurley turned to his son, Andrew.

Dan Hurley made sure his son Andrew got into the game to dribble out the final seconds of the National Championship 👏 pic.twitter.com/AsEzQReJIo

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) April 9, 2024

Say what you will for the senior guard, but he might be the single best closer in sports history.

Andrew Hurley, the most impactful player in all of college basketball 😤 pic.twitter.com/cKZYiVg6V0

— FanDuel Sportsbook (@FDSportsbook) April 9, 2024

Hurley walked on with UConn ahead of the 2020-21 season and steadily gained a cult following thanks to his limited playing time. He logged a total of 65 minutes over the past four years, registering 12 points, six rebounds and one assist.

At a time when the volume of "nepo baby" discourse has never been higher, some might have taken issue with the elder Hurley's decision to let Andrew have the final touch in such a monumental moment. But emptying the bench is the go-to tactic in any blowout, especially when it's a senior's last game.

If anything, Huskies fans might have been disappointed if Hurley wasn't the player to put the finishing touches on a second straight national championship.

The UConn men's basketball team set off celebrations on campus with its 75-60 victory over Purdue to clinch back-to-back national championships on Monday, although those celebrations reportedly led to some arrests.

According to Jane Caffrey of NBC Connecticut, UConn police arrested six people during Monday's celebrations. That total is much lower than the 30 arrests they made after last season's title-game win over San Diego State.

Although law enforcement made its presence known, there were still some light posts torn down and street signs torn out of the ground. Most notably, some who were celebrating threw one of the signs through a window at the campus rec center.

The university took some precautions this year before the men's and women's teams competed in the Final Four by removing some of the light posts to avoid some of the same instances as last year when students used the torn-down posts to smash into glass doors:

chaos in storrs #UCONN pic.twitter.com/FQcwoVW6M0

— Just Noogs (@justnoogs) April 4, 2023

As for Monday's celebration, UConn officials released a statement:

"Thousands of UConn students and others on the Storrs campus celebrated an amazing Husky victory this evening and the vast majority did so respectfully, responsibly, and safely. There were some incidents of vandalism following the victory, but they were limited in number.

"On the whole, it was a very good night on the Storrs campus and the university looks forward to continuing to celebrate our phenomenal student-athletes, their coaches, and this incredible win."

At this point, Huskies fans are no strangers to celebrating.

The women's basketball team has won 11 national championships since the 1994-95 campaign under head coach Geno Auriemma, while the men's team has won six since the 1998-99 season. The men's team also became the first men's program to win back-to-back championships since the Florida Gators of 2006 and 2007.

As long as head coach Dan Hurley and Auriemma are running the two basketball programs, there could be more celebrations to follow in the coming years.

Kentucky can definitively cross Dan Hurley off its list of candidates to replace John Calipari, who's reportedly on the way out.

Following UConn's 75-60 victory over Purdue in the 2024 men's basketball national championship game, Hurley quipped he "can't afford a divorce right now," which would be the likely outcome if he attempted to move his wife farther away from her home state of New Jersey, per ESPN's Pete Thamel.

Kentucky will contact Danny Hurley, Billy Donovan and Scott Drew. My guess is they will make all three of them say no

Maybe they all do but they will try with all before moving to another group

That group is much more wide open and could include a ton of people

— Matt Jones (@KySportsRadio) April 9, 2024

The coach then spoke in more practical terms about what he could achieve with the Huskies.

"Now you're thinking in your brain, as I'm looking at the locker room, about the chance to do it three times, like a dynasty in modern times," Hurley said. "I mean, that's what I'm thinking about."

The allure of coaching Kentucky is obvious. The Wildcats are college basketball royalty with eight national titles and 17 Final Four appearances, and they continue to be a landing spot for blue-chip recruits despite not having made the national semifinals since 2015.

But a move to Lexington isn't for everybody. The expectations are sky-high every season, the pressure is immense and there isn't the kind of administrative alignment you see at comparable programs across other sports around the country. NIL is reportedly a significant factor in why Calipari is weighing his future.

College basketball's top job? @TravisBranham_ says there's no excuse for Kentucky to have a worse NIL collective than Louisville and Arkansas (!).

UK's new coach must mobilize boosters and fans. https://t.co/APVcQpqEQu pic.twitter.com/WzhkEIMljf

— 247Sports (@247Sports) April 8, 2024

Already Alabama's Nate Oats has reaffirmed his commitment to his present job.

In the case of Hurley, it's hard to see how Kentucky could offer a more attractive situation than what he has in Storrs.

Basking in Monday's triumph, he told reporters the Huskies' second straight title is "up there in terms of the greatest two-year runs that a program maybe has ever had."

"I just think it's the best two-year run I think in a very, very long time just because of everything we lost from last year's team," he said. "To lose that much, and again, to do what we did again, it's got to be as impressive a two-year run as a program's had since prior to whoever did it before Duke. To me, it's more impressive than what Florida and Duke did because they brought back their entire teams. We lost some major players."

Thanks to the transfer portal, maintaining consistent success has never been more difficult. It's tough to build a roster with a view longer than one or two years, yet UConn just rolled to another championship after losing three players to the NBA in addition to some other key departures.

Beyond the historic appeal of a three-peat, Hurley knows he has the infrastructure in place to broadly achieve big things. Leaving that behind and starting anew somewhere else wouldn't make a lot of sense.

GLENDALE — The night before the Connecticut Huskies put the finishing touches on the most impressive, dominant—Dare we say, dynastic?—two-year run in at least the past three decades of men's college basketball, it was already abundantly clear that UConn head coach Dan Hurley had been chiseled into the Mount Rushmore of active coaches.

In a 24-hour news cycle that was hijacked by John Calipari's reported decision to leave Kentucky for Arkansas, the big question immediately became: Who takes that job in Lexington?

Alabama's Nate Oats, Auburn's Bruce Pearl, Baylor's Scott Drew, former Kentucky coach Rick Pitino and—per usual for every big college opening over the past decade—Billy Donovan were all thrown out there as viable candidates.

But Hurley leaving UConn for UK?

That was immediately dismissed as laughably unrealistic, both by the vast majority of those of us in the media, as well as by Hurley himself, when someone in the postgame presser had the audacity to ask him 75 minutes after winning his second consecutive national championship if he would be back with UConn next season.

"I don't think that's a concern," Hurley said after laughing for a bit. "My wife, you should have her answer that."

After all, why would he leave the wagon he has so meticulously constructed over the past six years?

"We're kind of getting used to this up here," Hurley told Ernie Johnson after the game on the championship podium. "For the last 25-30 years, UConn's been running college basketball."

Well...yes and no.

When Hurley first took the UConn job in 2018, the Huskies were a program in disarray.

Sure, now we're talking about the fact that they've won six of the last 25 national championships, as if they've been consistently good for a quarter century. But that simply isn't the case.

They had missed the NCAA tournament in each of their final two sub-.500 seasons under Kevin Ollie, and they went through a nasty breakup when they terminated him, resulting in a lawsuit against the university which Ollie won.

Moreover, they were stuck in a conference (AAC) their basketball program never wanted to be a part of in the first place. It wasn't until they returned to the Big East for the 2020-21 campaign that a return to anything resembling a dynastic run felt plausible again.

Even when they won their third and fourth national championships in 2011 and 2014, respectively, those were sort of one-off hot streaks for a program that struggled to generate sustained success, earning a No. 6 seed or better in the NCAA tournament just once in the span of nine years before hiring Hurley.

Long story short, UConn was a far cry from the annual juggernaut it has become today.

Building something out of nothing, though?

That's just what Hurley does.

You might love him. You might hate him.

You might view his antics on the sideline as the petulant outbursts of an overgrown toddler, or as the maniacal motivation that drives his teams toward greatness.

But, either way, it works, and you have to respect the results.

His teams just keep getting better and better.

In each of his two seasons at Wagner, the Seahawks were better than the previous year.

Only once during his six years with Rhode Island did the Rams post a worse record than the year prior.

And now in six years with UConn, he has once again worked his magic, increasing their winning percentage in each season at the helm, and making an even more relentless run through the NCAA tournament than last year, now winning 12 consecutive tournament games by double digits.

Can't say he didn't warn us, though.

Remember that press conference after the loss to Villanova in January 2020?

"You better get us now, because it's coming."

At the time, we all kind of laughed it off as unwarranted bravado. It was a classic spot to use that Jennifer Lawrence sarcastic "yeah, ok" thumbs-up gif, as Hurley was 26-24 in his first 50 games with the Huskies, leaving many to wonder if he was the right man for the job.

Hard to believe that was only four years ago, right?

Because now—with two national championships on his mantle and all of the positive momentum/recency bias in the world—you could make the case that Hurley is the greatest active men's basketball coach.

Gotta love HYPED Hurley 🔥#MarchMadness @UConnMBB pic.twitter.com/18ypKSyERt

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 9, 2024

He's now tied with Bill Self and (if you count the vacated one at Louisville) Rick Pitino for the most natties among active coaches. And Hurley has done so in just 14 years as a coach—and without any of the scandals that Self and Pitino have been involved in, unless you count occasional technical fouls or openly talking about superstitious underwear as scandalous behavior.

But if you think Hurley is satisfied with back-to-back titles, clearly you've never met the man.

Confetti was still falling from the rafters from this second national championship when he was turning his attention to the next one.

"On the flight home tomorrow, we'll start talking about what the roster's going to look like...We're going to be focusing on trying to put together a three-year run, not just a two-year run."

"I don't think that we're going anywhere."

Of course not. As already noted, in 13 of Hurley's 14 years as a D-I head coach, his team had a higher winning percentage than the previous season.

And, well, there technically is still room for improvement.

This 37-3 UConn team was arguably the most dominant men's college basketball team of the past quarter century, probably since the 1998-99 Duke team that UConn defeated in the national championship to really put this program on the map for the first time.

But Hurley's perpetual drive to get better just might push this program to the brink of the fabled 40-0 campaign in 2024-25.

Also, you know damn well he caught wind of the fact that Duke has already opened as the betting favorite to win it all next year, right?

Can't wait to see how he uses that as bulletin-board material for the next 12 months.

Atlanta Hawks star Trae Young showered praise on UConn head coach Dan Hurley after the Huskies defeated Purdue by the final score of 75-60 in the national championship game of the 2024 NCAA tournament.

"Dan Hurley gonna be considered one of the best to ever do it when his career is over," Young said in a post on X.

Dan Hurley gonna be considered one of the best to ever do it when his career is over

— Trae Young (@TheTraeYoung) April 9, 2024

The Huskies earned their second title under Hurley after winning the championship game in 2023, becoming the first team to earn back-to-back NCAA tournament titles since Florida in 2006 and 2007. The school now owns six total national championships.

UConn was dominant throughout the entire season, suffering just three total losses. The Huskies were unstoppable in March, winning each of their tournament games by a double-digit margin.

Young witnessed Hurley's excellence firsthand during his college days at Oklahoma. The 25-year-old averaged 27.4 points per game in his lone season with the Sooners, winning Big 12 Freshman of the Year honors. Hurley coached for Rhode Island at the time, with the two meeting during the first round of the 2018 tournament.

In a game that went to overtime, Hurley's Rams sent Oklahoma packing after earning a 83-78 victory.

Now, Young will focus on a different type of tournament as the Hawks are currently set to participate in the play-in tournament and potentially earn a playoff berth. Although he hasn't appeared in a game since Feb. 23 due to a finger injury, ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski reported on Monday that Young has been cleared to resume contact and practice once again.

As for Hurley, he cemented the Huskies as one of college basketball's modern dynasties.

The 2024 men's college basketball tournament concluded on Monday night, with UConn defeating Purdue by the final score of 75-60 in the title game. Although the Boilermakers only trailed by six points at the half, head coach Dan Hurley's team pulled away over the final 20 minutes of action.

The Huskies earned their sixth national championship as well as their second title under Hurley. UConn also became the first team to win back-to-back national championships since Florida in 2006 and 2007.

With March Madness over, it's time to take a look back on the tournament with the latest edition of "One Shining Moment."

ONE SHINING MOMENT 🙌#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/7x2R9DfyNM

— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 9, 2024

The video featured several memorable games and performances, such as the dominance of center Donovan Clingan during the Huskies' title run. While they fell just short, the Boilermakers and 2024 Naismith Men's College Player of the Year Zach Edey strung together an impressive series of wins in order to earn a spot in the championship game.

Sharpshooter Jack Gohlke helped No. 14 seed Oakland secure a surprising first-round upset victory over Kentucky, while burly forward DJ Burns Jr. led No. 11 seed NC State to its first Final Four appearance since 1983. Alabama was headlined by senior guard Mark Sears, with the Crimson Tide earning their own spot in the Final Four by winning hard-fought games over Clemson and North Carolina.

The 2024 NCAA tournament is in the books, with Clingan hoisting the trophy in the final shot of the video.