The Athletic CBB Power Rankings: UConn jumps to #1

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Men's college basketball power rankings: Why UConn is now on top

The Huskies are roaring to end 2022, winning on both ends on the floor.

theathletic.com

You have to hand it to Georgetown: They kept us honest.

There are three ways we here at power rankings HQ watch games: live on press row; live at home; on Synergy the following day. At the risk of offering free advertising, Synergy makes watching and researching so much faster and so much more customizable that we don’t necessarily worry about having a bunch of screens on at one time, or about missing a huge game driving back from, say, Charlottesville on a Saturday night. You can always catch up later, and so it’s OK to temporarily write things off. Georgetown at UConn? File that one in the Synergy pile. Safe to ignore.

Except it wasn’t. Georgetown — the same 5-8 Hoyas who just lost 83-64 at Syracuse and then gave up 102 points in 77 possessions to Xavier at home — led 60-53 in Gampel Pavilion with as few as 10 minutes remaining in the second half. Mathematically speaking, that lead with that time left gave the Hoyas a not-insignificant chance of upsetting a dominant unbeaten team on its own floor. It was the first time UConn had trailed in the second half of any game all season. OK, Georgetown! You had our curiosity; now you have our attention, etc. Let’s go ahead and flip back over and oh, yep, looks like UConn has woken up ha ha welp never mind all that.

There was a sequence midway through the second half that epitomized the Huskies’ explosive brilliance, and it started with Joey Calcaterra, who had gone scoreless in the opening 29 minutes of the game. He had a reverse left-hand layup off a back cut, followed by a forced steal, a nifty catch by the sideline, a drive into the heart of the defense, and a behind-the-back dump-off that cut Georgetown’s lead to two and sent the Gampel crowd into ballistics. UConn pressed the next inbounds and got a turnover and an immediate Hassan Diarra layup. After a good defensive play by underrated freshman big Donovan Clingan, Diarra buried a guarded kickout 3, and then Clingan blocked two Qudus Wahab shots in a row before feeding a break that ended with a wide-open Calcaterra 3. Roughly two minutes of game time had elapsed, and UConn had gone from down by eight to up by six. Georgetown looked deeply confused.

Stingy defense, savvy offense, flow, intuition, and a crowd absolutely losing its mind: It was everything that has made UConn so good so far, purified and condensed.

Give the Hoyas credit. They could have been blown away. Instead, they hung around. (They also missed some open looks that could have made things even more interesting.) Connecticut wasn’t at its best Tuesday night for the vast majority of the 40 minutes; it was much more dominant last weekend at Butler, when Adama Sanogo had 27 and 14 and the Huskies held the Bulldogs to 46 points in 67 possessions (gulp). But on Tuesday, when UConn really needed to elevate, when it needed something more, it was damn near transcendent. It looked like the best team in the country to us.