GLENDALE, Ariz. — In the summer of 2022, Connecticut coach Dan Hurley decided he was going to adopt a new offensive system and a new way of teaching set plays. Hurley opted to go with a football approach. He came up with a glossary of terms for different alignments and actions.
He gives a made-up example: “14 jet zoom pitch twin.”
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The 14 is for the alignment — a one-four low — and then the Huskies stack actions on top of each other. In this case, a jet, then a zoom, then a pitch, then a twin.
“It’s like learning a language,” Hurley says.
The new offense, heavy on off-ball screening and movement, won the Huskies a national title in 2023. Then last summer, Hurley essentially ripped up the UConn dictionary and came up with a new glossary of terms.
“We do that because of paranoia,” says assistant coach Luke Murray, who acts as the program’s offensive coordinator.
It’s probably not necessary, because UConn’s choreographed sets leave opponents’ heads spinning already. Defending UConn is like trying to multitask inside a classroom full of screaming children. An example from Saturday’s semifinal against Alabama:
The play starts when UConn’s best shooter, Cam Spencer, catches the ball and passes to the wing, then gets a chin screen set for him by Donovan Clingan and heads toward the basket. He then loops around and sets a back screen for Alex Karaban. This is where the confusion for Alabama’s defense begins. Alabama’s Aaron Estrada and Rylan Griffen almost switch.
Grant Nelson, defending Clingan, is standing in the middle of the lane, sagging off Clingan and attempting to play the role of air traffic controller. His head is turning right and left, keeping an eye on what’s happening behind him. With the two Alabama guards confused on the switch, Spencer turns to his right and sets the first of two stagger screens meant for Tristen Newton. Newton rejects the screen and cuts to the basket. This actually gives Griffen the chance to get back in position, but then comes another screen from Clingan. And Griffen is toast. Spencer curls and gets a free-throw line jumper. Ideally, Nelson would provide help, but he was stuck in his control center in the paint and scared to fully abandon Clingan rolling to the rim.
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It takes three or four viewings to figure out exactly what’s happening. Now imagine trying to defend all of that in real-time.
“I’ve been studying the top offenses in the country in-depth for the past five years, and UConn’s combination of off-ball screening and ball movement within their sets and the number of sets that they run makes it the most complex offense that I’ve seen in that time,” says Jordan Sperber, a former video coordinator at New Mexico State who has become the X’s-and-O’s czar of college basketball, documenting it all in his weekly Hoops Vision newsletter. Sperber made a UConn offense video last month titled “Why This Offense is Basketball Poetry.”
“Their halfcourt offense is picturesque,” Xavier coach Sean Miller says.
Last week, Philadelphia 76ers wing Nicolas Batum tweeted that he’s unfamiliar with watching college basketball, but “the way UConn is playing is the way basketball should be taught and played. Especially at that age.”
Bob Hurley Sr., the father of Dan and a coaching legend himself, says all of his coaching buddies back east rave to him how fun this team is to watch.
Dan Hurley has long had a reputation for coaching tough teams who play hard. But an offensive savant? Typically his defenses were always better than his offenses. Not until his 11th season as a college head coach did Hurley have a top-50 offense. And last season, when the Huskies finished third, was Hurley’s first time with a top-20 offense. This year’s Huskies enter Monday night’s national championship game against Purdue as the most efficient offense in college basketball. It feels like he’s on the verge of a dynasty.
How did this happen?
When Hurley took over Connecticut in 2018, the Huskies were in the American Athletic Conference. The best teams in the league were Houston and Wichita State. Those teams had big, physical frontlines, so Hurley tried to match them. At Rhode Island, Hurley had played a lot of four-and-around-one with a heavy dose of ball-screen offense. He carried the ball-screen concepts over to UConn, but now he had two posts on the floor. Spacing was a problem.
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Hurley wanted to go to a more modern approach with four perimeter players, and he brought on Murray to help him with the offense. Murray had been with Hurley in his first season as a college head coach at Wagner in 2010-11. Hurley tried to make up for a talent gap that season by milking the shot clock. If you study all of his teams, it’s that first Wagner team that’s probably most identifiable to his last two UConn squads. The strength of that roster was its shooting, and Hurley ran a lot of floppy action to free shooters. Wagner finished 18th that season in assist rate. Hurley wouldn’t have another team finish in the top 100 in assist rate until last year’s team finished eighth. (This year’s team is fifth.)
Murray rejoined Hurley in April 2021, but they couldn’t institute the plan right away because Hurley felt loyalty to senior forward Isaiah Whaley. Also, point guard RJ Cole was best operating out of ball screens, so UConn played a traditional two-big lineup and leaned on the pick-and-roll.
But in the summer of 2022, the plan was put in place. The Huskies had an elite shooter in Jordan Hawkins, who was perfect as a marksman they could run off screens and use his gravity to open others. Then they also had the ideal stretch four in Karaban, a freshman who graduated early and showed up at semester break during the 2021-22 season.
“It was really clear that we were going to move to a much more of an off-ball screening identity,” Murray says.
Hurley and Murray studied European teams, stealing different concepts and packages that they could use.
“It’s not like a replica necessarily,” Murray says. “It’s just piecing together what makes the most sense for the group that we have.”
The goal is to put stress on the defense, stacking multiple actions that create indecision for the defense. Most set plays are choreographed. While the Huskies sometimes looked patterned, their offense is like a choose-your-own-adventure story.
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“If you make a decision to reject the screen, now that sets off a chain of events with two or three other off-ball scenarios,” Murray explains. “That’s something that we really work on hard, because good defensive teams a lot of times can do a good job at taking teams out of set plays. But I think the randomness of the way that we cut, the randomness of the way that we screen and the versatility of our guys as passers and movers and screeners and shooters really makes it hard.”
Murray says that the Huskies take a lot of pride in their defense, which ranks fourth nationally, but he estimates practices are a 65-35 split between offense and defense.
“You can have the greatest concepts in the world, but guys have to be able to execute them with intelligence, and with a knack for timing and spacing and really having a great understanding of how they’re being defended,” Murray says. “That’s one of the things that we try to emphasize a lot in game prep. Most scouting is based on what the other team is running. For us, we talk a lot about the way that the other team is guarding us.”
Because the Huskies set so many off-ball screens, a lot of teams switch frequently. Early in the season that switching gave UConn some issues. While injuries played a part in UConn’s loss at Kansas, KU’s switching defense also stymied the Huskies in their first loss of the season.
They spent a lot of practice time early repping what to do against these switches. When Clingan was hurt, they started building more cutting into their sets, especially when they would go to five-out offense with Karaban at center.
“They got really good against anybody that switches with their slipping and their false actions,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott says. “If you shoot under a screen, or make a mistake on a late switch, they’ll break out of it and try to make you pay.”
It’s especially difficult to stop when Clingan has the ball up top or in the corner, pulling the rim-protector away. Clingan is good at reading the defense and he easily sees over the defense because of his height. This is when back cuts are deadly.
The endless cutting puts the defense in a panic.
“If you cut and you don’t get the ball, you open it up for someone else,” Karaban says.
The Huskies also can punish switches with the drive. If a big man switches onto Newton, which happens in the play below, he knows it’s time to attack.
Clingan is also capable of executing dribble handoffs, and his sheer size makes those actions almost impossible to defend because it’s hard to get around him. And if Clingan’s man decides to switch, the Huskies will send him to the post and try to feed him the ball there.
A lot of last year’s offense was built around Hawkins running around endless screens and then a late duck-in for Adama Sanogo. The plan this year was to mostly replicate what worked last year except for more pick-and-roll for Clingan and backup center Samson Johnson. Finding a replacement for Hawkins became a necessity. The Huskies landed Spencer, who shot 43.4 percent on 3s last season at Rutgers, but the Huskies figured out he was capable of being more than just a knockdown shooter.
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Defending last year’s team was like trying to figure out geometry. This season it’s like trying to solve trigonometry. Spencer can handle the ball in the pick-and-roll and then is awesome moving without the ball. He has the highest offensive rating in college basketball. Karaban can also fly off screens and is a terrific cutter. And they’re not always coming from the same spots.
“They can run the same action and flip-flop players, which I don’t think is as common as everybody would think,” Miller says.
“What this coaching staff does better than anybody is just put you in position to be successful,” Spencer says. “They’re gonna help you play to your strengths and help you grow your weaknesses. There are times to go off script, and Coach Hurley will let you know when those times are, but you don’t have to with this team, honestly. We’re so unselfish, and the ball will find you. And if it doesn’t, then too bad; it’s not your night.”
That line of thinking is why UConn’s shot selection is so good. It’s also why the Huskies rank 328th in adjusted tempo, because many halfcourt possessions can go deep into the shot clock.
“When they’re in the halfcourt, they’re very patient and they execute,” Miller says. “But when you talk about what makes them great, I think it’s the combination of how elite they are in transition and running their sets. I don’t think there’s anybody in college basketball that’s more dangerous in the open court.”
This is the other area where Hurley wanted to become elite. He likes to strike fast off missed shots, not wanting his players to look for a play call from the sideline, but rather move it up the floor quickly and hunt transition 3s. The Huskies are the seventh-most efficient transition team in college basketball and rank fifth in halfcourt efficiency, per Synergy. They are the only team in the country to rank in the top 10 in both.
Those numbers are only reflective of first-chance opportunities and do not value second-chance and third-chance opportunities, and UConn ranks 13th in offensive rebounding rate.
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“Your work starts when they shoot the shot,” McDermott says, “because they’re coming on the offensive glass.”
It’s exhausting to face, because there’s never a moment to relax against the Huskies. It’s why they’ve now won 11 straight games by double-digits in the NCAA Tournament. Alabama hung around for 35 minutes on Saturday, but then Spencer hit that free-throw line jumper, then came another intricate, 20-second set that set up a Karaban 3-pointer, then came a pick-and-roll dunk for Clingan, then Spencer curled around a Clingan screen, engaged his defender and passed him the ball for a dunk — another beautiful play design that eliminated the help.
The (Crimson) Tide broke, as the Huskies scored on seven of their final nine possessions.
Every game seems inevitable, and Miller says the scary part out loud for the rest of college basketball.
“(Hurley) has grown and evolved,” Miller says. “He’s become more sophisticated, and certainly more sure of himself.”
And that evolved offensive approach has him on the brink of back-to-back titles. And who knows how many more.
(Top photo of Cam Spencer: Elsa / Getty Images)
