Dan Hurley's Character Emerges When UConn Players Are At Their Lowest

Huskies players will run through a wall for Hurley, and there's a reason why

Joe Buglewicz / Stringer / Getty Images Sport via Getty Images

You can’t judge a person’s character when they’re at the top of the mountain, which is why everyone in the basketball world’s been wondering for the last two years … what kind of person is Dan Hurley?

Haters aplenty flocked to X during the Maui Invitational to mock Hurley’s passionate coaching style and attempt to brand it as a negative for the game (it’s a positive). The same crowd denounced UConn as a non-contender, a label that the Huskies have already debunked with a trio of wins over Baylor, Texas, and Gonzaga.

But big wins and championship banners aren't the markers that tell you something important about Dan Hurley. Rather, it’s Hurley’s ability to deal with failure — and support his players through it — that makes him a unique entity in the college basketball sphere.

Resilience on steroids is the best way to describe how Hurley and his Huskies went from leaving Maui an 0-3 laughingstock and — less than three weeks later — strutted out of Madison Square Garden on Saturday night looking like a Final Four favorite.

But again, it’s not just the results that matter. It’s the way that Hurley backs his players, especially during difficult moments, that has helped construct a transcendent culture in Storrs.

If you watch UConn games closely, from time to time you will catch a glimpse, a window into just how much Hurley supports his players on a human level.

One such moment occurred on Saturday night under the bright lights of MSG. Samson Johnson fell to the floor with an injury and wasn’t getting up. Before any of the training staff got to Johnson, Hurley himself sprinted over to his center with the desperation of a parent snatching their child away from oncoming traffic. Then, as Johnson gained his wind and rose to return to the bench, it was Hurley who raised his arms to the Garden crowd like a Roman gladiator and begged for a raucous ovation for Johnson, which the UConn faithful delivered with explosive enthusiasm.

It wasn’t the first time this season Hurley has darted over to ensure his player’s safety, whether physical or psychological.

When Hassan Diarra missed a potential game-clinching three at the buzzer versus Colorado in Maui, it was Hurley who was by Diarra’s side before the senior guard even realized what had just happened. Hurley had sprinted across the floor to pick his point guard off the ground within milliseconds of the ball clanking out.

A lot of coaches in these situations would be thinking about the results and their implications, but Hurley is always thinking about his players first, and his actions display his inner priorities. To Hurley, his players are more important than winning the game, and they feel that. That’s one of the reasons no one plays harder than UConn players.

No one in college basketball moves quite like Hurley, whether he’s he's lifting his player off the ground, screaming or hugging a ref (depends on the day), or pumping up an arena of 20,000.

You’re not going to fully appreciate Hurley if you just look at him as a basketball coach, though. Basketball, ultimately, is just a game, and UConn’s culture extends way beyond putting a ball in a hoop. There's something else happening with this program ... something that even non-sports fans could admire, so long as they are sympathetic to the human condition.

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