 Rashad Anderson and the Huskies held the No. 1 spot in the rankings for eight weeks. AP |
|
|
SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- Connecticut never let up, and Georgia Tech was never in the game.
The Huskies won their second national championship with a start-to-finish effort expected from the team that was ranked No. 1 twice as long as any other this season. The 82-73 victory Monday night was a 40-minute glimpse of what Connecticut does best.
The Huskies played defense like the team first in the nation in field-goal percentage defense and blocked shots. The offense was keyed by running off missed shots and Georgia Tech missed a lot of shots.
"I was thinking `You want to run with us? You don't know about running with us.' We made the tact that we were going to come at them and play Connecticut basketball," Huskies coach Jim Calhoun said. "The biggest thing was we were free to play our basketball against a team everybody assumed would be quicker, but we actually used our quickness to outrebound them."
It didn't matter that the lead was 15 points at halftime -- the third-largest in championship game history -- or 25 with just over 14 minutes to go, Calhoun never took his foot off the pedal and his team got to cut down the nets.
"We got the big lead and then we had the great start to the second half to take the thing from 15 to 23, 24 and by that time you weren't going to catch us," Calhoun said. "Then they made a lot of 3s to make it a different score but I think that was one of the most dominating performances we could have had."
Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt had talked extensively about his team's "pass first" approach. The Yellow Jackets not only didn't pass much in the first half, they shot first and the shots weren't even good ones.
Instead of going inside at All-America center Emeka Okafor, Georgia Tech stayed on the perimeter and seemed to forget about 7-foot-1 Luke Schenscher inside. He only took five shots in the first half, while the Yellow Jackets took twice that many behind the 3-point line, hitting only two.
With a player like Okafor, who led the country with 4.1 blocks per game, you have to be willing to have some shots batted away to make him play defense and maybe get fouls called against him.
"I thought in the first half we may have taken a couple of hurried shots," Hewitt said. "At the start of the second half we got three or four touches in the post, they just didn't fall. You know, it happens like that some nights. You've got to give UConn credit. I'm not going to sit here and say they didn't have anything to do with our shooting effort tonight. They had a lot to do with it."
In the semifinal win over Duke, Okafor had two fouls in the opening four minutes of the game. Against Georgia Tech, he got his second with 5 seconds left in the first half. He finished with 24 points and 15 rebounds and was selected the Final Four's Most Outstanding Player.
"It's just the mentality," Okafor said. "It's the national championship, you just do what you have to do."
Georgia Tech, which entered the game shooting 46.8 percent from the field, shot 29.4 percent (10-for-34) in the first half and 38 percent for the game (27-for-71).
The Yellow Jackets started hitting 3-pointers in a late run that got them within seven points, but the outcome was never really in doubt.
"I don't think they took us out of our offense," Georgia Tech guard Marvin Lewis said. "They played great defense. I just think the ball didn't fall in the hole."
Connecticut was No. 1 in the preseason poll and the Huskies were on top for a total of eight weeks, four more than Duke and Stanford. They may have entered the NCAA tournament ranked No. 7, but they finished with their second national championship in five years.
"This team endured the mantle of expectation not just from November, but from September," Calhoun said. "Over the past four weeks, we went on an amazing run."
• 
