The UConn Huskies are the best college basketball team we’ve seen in years. On Monday night, the Huskies thumped Purdue, 75-60, to win their second National Championship in a row.
Purdue’s Zach Edey — the back-to-back National Player of the Year — kept the Boilermakers in the game throughout the first half. The towering center scored 14 points in the first 12 minutes of action, but UConn managed to stifle the rest of Purdue’s offense and took a six-point lead into halftime.
The second half was all Connecticut. As the Huskies opted to focus on stopping everyone not named Edey, Purdue couldn’t hit a shot. Overall, the team shot 1-of-7 from three and Edey scored 37 of the team’s 60 points. UConn only made six threes of its own (6-of-22) but had four players score double-figures — Purdue had five players score a point, and three of those players scored five points or less.
The Huskies became the first team to go back-to-back since Florida in 2006 and 2007.
“What could you say?” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “We won — by a lot again.”
En route to last year’s championship, UConn beat its six opponents by an average of 20.0 points. This year, the margin of victory increased to 23.3 points per game. All 12 wins have been by 10+ points.
“I think it’s up there in terms of the greatest two-year runs that a program maybe has ever had,” Hurley said. “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. 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.”
The Huskies are the class of college basketball at the moment and it is difficult to imagine them falling off any time soon. Don’t be surprised to see UConn back in the hunt for a three-peat in 2025.
