ARLINGTON, Texas — The old coach was joking with the young player, kidding with him, but the old coach is a smart man who certainly knew precisely what he was doing as he took the young player aside.
“Man,” Jim Calhoun said Friday night, “nobody is talking about you!”
DeAndre Daniels smiled when his coach said this, and he smiled as he retold the story.
“Not to worry, Coach,” Daniels replied. “Everyone will be talking about me after tomorrow.”
And so they are. In a spring that has looked so much like another spring out of three years ago, with Shabazz Napier playing the part of Kemba Walker, Daniels is the latest Connecticut Husky to clear his throat, raise his hand, and say: “Don’t forget about me.”
It wasn’t just Daniels’ 20 points and 10 rebounds that powered the Huskies past the top-ranked Florida Gators on Saturday night, 63-53, ending Florida’s 30-game winning streak and landing the Huskies 40 minutes away from securing their fourth national championship. Those helped, mind you.
More, it was the way, with the season leaking away, with UConn dying for someone to demand the ball and command the game, Daniels did so without being asked. The Gators had come storming out of the gate and the Huskies had been dormant out of the gate, and after 11 minutes and nine seconds UConn was stuck on a sickly four points. Florida led by a dozen. Trouble loomed. Elimination beckoned.
“We understood they came out full intensity,” Napier said. “But we keep our composure. We’ve been in so many dogfights. Coach [Kevin] Ollie said in the huddle, ‘Guys, we’ve been here before believe in each other.’ ”
They believed in Daniels. Daniels believed in himself. And he knocked down a 3 that, immediately, felt like four times as many points. For the first time UConn could exhale. For the first time they looked like the team that had ransacked the Eastern bracket, four games in which three times they had trailed by as many as nine.
“They were leaving DeAndre open,” Napier said, “and he took advantage of that. And when he knocks down that 3 our
fans went crazy and then we understood what was going to happen next.”
What happened next was an 11-0 splurge in the next 101 seconds (aided by another 3 from Daniels), a 21-6 burst to end the half, and one that wouldn’t stop until the score was 39-29, the run was 35-13, and the Gators officially were sent to the critical list. They hadn’t lost since Dec. 2 — also to UConn — and though they had trailed a few times in the second halves of the 30 games connecting the two showdowns, they always had been able to own the games when they absolutely needed them.
But they hadn’t faced this buzzsaw before, this dangerous mix of talent and character and us-versus-them, these Huskies who should’ve lost to St. Joseph’s, who could’ve lost to Villanova, who seemed on the brink of being blown out of the gym by Michigan State. And who never relinquished the lead in the final 20 minutes even as Florida’s mood grew foul and their mindset grew desperate.
“We are so unselfish,” guard Ryan Boatright said. “We really don’t care who does the scoring.”
Said Ollie: “We are not a one-man team.”
He’s right, of course. Napier can be so good some nights it’s hard to keep your eyes off him on either end of the floor, but no team makes it to Monday night without having two and three and four go-to players. Daniels didn’t always play at this level this year, a frustration to himself and his coach.
It was hard to even remember in the afterglow of postgame, as UConn faithful roared, as Napier jogged off the court with his right index finger waving above his head — “One more to go,” he said — and with the Gators standing stunned and staggered, beaten in every phase of the game by the last team to beat them 124 days earlier.
“I’m glad I really stepped up,” Daniels said.
He had a cast of thousands, backing him up, bleeding blue, wondering what more he might have up his sleeve. Monday is for champions. The Huskies got there. Why can’t they get there the whole way?