LAHAINA, Hawaii – It will be an especially long flight back to Connecticut for the UConn men’s basketball team, which was stunned for the third straight year at the Maui Invitational, losing the seventh-place game to Dayton 85-67.

With about two minutes left, fans headed for the exits, which turned into a blast as the Flyers built an insurmountable 16-point lead and secured the game, which didn’t begin until 12:32 p.m. ET.

UConn is now 9-6 all-time in the Maui Invitational and 4-3 on the young season.

“It’s scary that a five-point game turned into this with five minutes left,” coach Dan Hurley said. “When you come to a tournament like this and there are three games in three days, things start to go bad and there is no way to fix it because there is no time. You just have to deal with the situation. It’s obviously been a humbling journey for the program to accomplish what we did.”

The Huskies showed a different defensive intensity than they had in their first two games at the 2,400-seat Lahaina Civic Center, but that faded as the first half wore on.

UConn made just six of its first 19 shots until Alex Karaban caught fire. The veteran leader, coming off a foul-plagued six-point performance Tuesday in which he never found his shot, hit his first 3-pointer of the game with 6:47 left in the first half. After Ahmad Nowell assisted Solo Ball on a dunk, Karaban made three straight three-pointers to give the Huskies their first lead since the score was 3-0.

Karaban finished the game with a team-high 21 points on 7 of 15 from the field and was one of four scorers in double figures, as Samson Johnson added 12 and Ball and Hassan Diarra each scored 10 points. Freshman Liam McNeeley followed up his career-best 20 points with an 0-for-9 mark from the field on Tuesday.

UConn was outrebounded 41-25 for the second straight game on Wednesday night.

“It’s so many things,” Hurley said. “It’s so many things. I can’t remember the last time we out-rebounded by 16. I mean, that’s what we do to people. But there are mistakes in discipline, that’s bad coaching. Just not in the right places. There’s obviously the free throw discrepancy the whole time we’ve been here, which is a byproduct of a lack of discipline and other factors.”

The Flyers grabbed the momentum with back-to-back 3-pointers and former St. John’s and Butler guard Posh Alexander created open shots from mid-range and scored Dayton’s final six points to take a 41-34 lead into halftime bring to. Alexander finished the game with 16 points and six assists.

UConn found itself on the wrong side of a significant free throw imbalance at halftime for the third straight game, thanks in part to the Huskies making 16 three-pointers (for six) while Dayton made seven attempts from long range. While foul trouble was largely avoided in the first 20 minutes, the Flyers had a 15-4 lead at the free throw line.

Diarra provided a breakthrough as he scored nine of UConn’s first 13 points in the second half, including a three-pointer that beat the shot clock and tied the game at the end of a 7-0 run that he started with a shot of one. Alley-oop to Samson Johnson led to the 43rd score. He had three steals in the first 10 minutes after halftime and created opportunities in transition.

But the shots continued to come for Dayton, which led the game for more than 35 minutes.

And the Flyers crowd was active, on their feet for most of the game, chanting “overrated” and multiple “Hurley is angry!”

Dayton played harder as the game progressed.

There was a flagrant 1 foul on Karaban with 5:39 to play, UConn trailing by five minutes after a video review showed he did not allow Isaac Jack, the shooter, adequate landing space. The Flyers used four consecutive free throws to go on a 7-0 run and began to blow the game away.

Enoch Cheeks (20 points, seven rebounds) made a wide-open 3-pointer to extend the Flyers’ lead to 12 with 4:27 left, forcing Hurley to call a timeout as the Huskies remained exposed defensively. Cheeks was fouled at the rim and received a friendly bounce for a three-point play, and he and Nate Santos (18 points) hit consecutive jumpers to extend the Flyers’ lead to 16.

Karaban went down hard after a foul attempting a layup and hit his head on the court with two and a half minutes left. He made his free throws and stayed in the game until there were 36 seconds left. The Huskies star was taken to a local hospital for further evaluation after the game.

Dayton finished the game on its final six field throws, extending its lead to as many as 20 points in the final minute.

“I just think we need to come back and I think we both need to regroup mentally and come up with a different plan defensively for the most part,” Hurley said. “We’re a pretty efficient offensive team. We missed a lot of free throws. Liam had great looks and some edge. I think we’ll do well offensively. But defensively it was a disaster for us. As many times as we’ve just thrown, overall I don’t even know what the whole free throw thing looked like in the three games here and how many points we’ve exceeded at the free throw line. It was minus 20 degrees today, so…”

The Flyers shot 50% from the field and 8 of 17 (47.1%) from distance and scored 27 points on 30 attempts from the free throw line. The Huskies shot 41.9% from the field in both halves, but were just 2 of 13 from long range in the second half.

UConn makes a quick turnaround before hosting Maryland Eastern Shore in its fifth buying game of the season on Saturday at the XL Center.

“This UConn team that has lost three in a row out here is not the UConn team we were. It’s the UConn team we are right now and I think it’s going to get a lot better. We rely on a lot of young players. The burden of wearing the uniform after two consecutive deployments seems to be weighing heavily on the group at the moment. I think right now we just have to try to focus on being a good team and becoming a tougher team,” Hurley said. “Right now we are just a shell of what we once were.”

Originally published: November 28, 2024 at 3:01 am EST