NEW YORK — There are multiple sides to most great, or potentially great players, and so it is with Donovan Clingan. There’s the happy-go-lucky college kid from Bristol who’s living the dream at UConn and loving it, who is taller than everyone around him and suitably goofy.
“He’s a gentle giant,” Dan Hurley said, going back to a theme he introduced before this season had even begun. “He’s the Jolly Green Giant. Sometimes, he’s got to get that intensity level up, get that nastiness. He’s such a sweetheart of a guy.”
This is the side, at times like this, UConn doesn’t care to see. No, they like Clingan when he’s angry.
Most of the Huskies came out a little flat against Xavier in the Big East quarterfinal Thursday. Maybe Xavier, having played and won the day before, was warmed up and had momentum. Maybe Xavier, facing the end of its season, was fighting a little harder than UConn anticipated.
Or maybe it was just a noon game and the coffee hadn’t kicked in. But Clingan was more lethargic than a 7-foot-2 center who’s projected to go in the first round of the NBA draft should be on a big stage with scouts everywhere. He missed a point-blank layup on the first possession, turned it over on the third possession. The Huskies were down 10-2 when Clingan checked out of the game for some self-talk.
“It was all a mental thing to me,” Clingan said. “I sat on the bench when I first came out, at the 17-minute mark, and I just told myself, ‘Wake up.’ ”
UConn’s sheer supremacy asserted itself and the Huskies scrambled back to take a one-point lead, though Clingan was 1 for 3 in the half, and the team outscored by six while he was on the floor. Second half? The Jolly Green Giant was gone, and the lean, mean monster was loose, transformed starting with a block on Xavier’s first possession.
“Everybody was just telling me, ‘You’re not playing like yourself,'” Clingan said after the Huskies’ 87-60 victory. “‘You’ve got to go out there, play mean, play aggressive, step into dunks and tear the rim off. Block shots. Be the aggressive player you’ve been.’ That block got me going, got some momentum and got my confidence up.”
DC AND-1 😤 pic.twitter.com/m8QjAzuZHC
— UConn Men's Basketball (@UConnMBB) March 14, 2024
Clingan was 5-for-5 in the second half, scored 11 straight points, outscoring Xavier 11-4 in a 3-minute stretch that helped UConn blow the game open. He finished with 13 points, seven rebounds, four assists and two blocks. This was as on-point as a center can be for 20 minutes.
What, or who, gets to Clingan when it’s time to change from Jolly Green Giant into the Incredible Hulk? Sometimes it’s Hurley, sometimes it’s the assistant coaches, sometimes it’s the other players.
“I do it quickly because he’s an enormous human being,” Hurley said. “And you just never know how a giant will respond. He’s so hard on himself, he’s such a perfectionist, you say it quickly and he’s going to respond always for you. You don’t have to ride him and you don’t have to prompt him too long.”
Said Cam Spencer: “We have a great relationship with Donovan. If you have to get on him, he takes coaching. He hears things well from his teammates.”
But Clingan is best served, and at his best, when he pushes his own buttons and, to his credit, he’s willing to do it.
“He always holds himself accountable,” Alex Karaban said. “He’s always telling us, ‘I’ve got to be better, I’ve got to do this or that.’ He opened up and he told us he was going to play better and we appreciate that. We know he’s capable of so much more than he did at the beginning and what he did to get himself going was really special and it shows why he’s one of the best big men in the country.”
The beauty of this UConn team, the reason it is 29-3, is that on most days or nights it can afford a sluggish half from one of its star players and remain in control. This little tale-of-two-halves, 27-point victory over a decent Xavier team indicates that even now, the margin of error can be pretty wide. The Huskies’ 58.3 percent shooting in the second half, the 29 assists on 35 field goals, show a team with no apparent weakness. All the offense was actually ignited by the defense, where Clingan played the dominant role.
On a day when comparisons were in the air between last year’s national champions to this year’s team on a mission to go back-to-back, the Clingan-Samson Johnson tandem in the middle started to look more like the Adama Sanogo-Clingan tandem that gave the Huskies too much for opponents to handle a year ago.
Rick Pitino and St. John’s, a team on the NCAA bubble going into Friday’s semifinal game, will be a bear for UConn in a third meeting. It just feels as though one of the few things that can spoil this weekend for the Huskies is for their gentle giant to raise his head at the wrong time, and let a desperate team make off with the Big East tournament.
Oh, yes the Huskies like Donovan Clingan when he’s angry.
“It’s win or go home,” Clingan said. “The season is on the line. This is everything. This is what we worked all year for. In my head, I just realize, stop worrying about what happened in the past, worry about the future. We know what our goal is. We’ve got to play at our highest level.”
Has UConn become a men's basketball 'villain'? If so, Dan Hurley doesn't mind
“If your fanbase loves you, loves you, loves you, and the people you’re competing against really despise you, you’re probably doing pretty good.”https://t.co/QwBXWKZ3dS
— Joe Arruda (@joearruda9) March 13, 2024
