A trying season ends
WORCESTER, Mass. – Defending champions are never supposed to have it easy the next season. It’s tough to repeat for a lot of reasons, but for the Connecticut Huskies, the 2004-05 season was perhaps an extreme case of this.
With Sunday’s 65-62 loss, a season that was trying at times on the young Huskies came to an end. No one can say that this team didn’t accomplish anything, especially in light of what they had to go through.
The Huskies still had plenty of talent and some experience, though they lost a lot of the latter with Emeka Okafor and Ben Gordon going to the NBA with a season of eligibility left. Add in the graduation of four-year starting point guard Taliek Brown – easily a forgotten man since two first team All-Americans left as well – and this team took a real hit. Sure, the cupboard was hardly bare – plenty of coaches would love to have players like Marcus Williams, Rashad Anderson, Rudy Gay, Charlie Villanueva and Josh Boone – but any way you look at it, the Huskies took a big hit.
The talent and experience base wouldn’t be the only places where this team would take hits. The Huskies went through quite a season of adversity off the court, and for a couple of players, basketball became very secondary concerns. It started before the season, when assistant coach Clyde Vaughan resigned in late August after being arrested for soliciting a prostitute. Vaughan had recruited many of the current players, so they were losing someone they had a rapport with.
Things didn’t end there. In October, freshman A.J. Price nearly died from a brain hemorrhage. He spent two weeks in Hartford Hospital, with players and coaches frequently visiting him. Head coach Jim Calhoun recalls the impact this had on a few of his players when they saw the condition Price was in.
“We took the older kids in to see A.J. with a tube down his throat – three of the kids walked out of the room,” Calhoun recalls.
In early January, a cerebral angiogram revealed that Price has a vascular abnormality known as Arteriovenous Malformation (AVM) – a mass of abnormal blood vessels which grow in the brain. Price is expected to make a full recovery and live a normal life, a recovery which can take several months. That remains his top priority.
From a basketball standpoint, it’s debatable how much Price’s absence hurt the team. Antonio Kellogg, not a natural point guard, filled in at the position and was often ineffective before being suspended for the NCAA Tournament. It meant that they were going to live and die by the play of sophomore Marcus Williams, and he responded with a tremendous season. Williams not only led the nation in assists, but he showed terrific leadership ability. He certainly wasn’t the reason they lost to North Carolina State on Sunday to end their season.
As if that wasn’t enough, Anderson was struggling to shoot the ball for a while. Prior to their loss against Pittsburgh on January 22, Anderson was shooting just 29 percent on three-pointers. That game started a hot streak for the junior guard, as he shot nearly 53 percent from the field and over 47 percent on three-pointers in the next six games. Just when he was starting to come alive, he suffered a skin abscess in the inner thigh of his right leg.
The injury seemed innocent enough, but complications would arise before long. At one point, Anderson was having breathing difficulties, saying later that he was probably about 20 minutes away from tubing because his lungs filled with fluid. The doctors still don’t know what caused the complications. One thing is for sure: the junior guard is happy to be alive, let alone playing basketball.
“You just have to put things in perspective,” said Anderson. “It could have been any one of my teammates. There was a point where they didn’t think I’d make it. My parents were in and out of the room; my mom had stepped out of the room, my father had to leave the room temporarily sometimes because he couldn’t stand to see me like that.”
If what happened to Price and Anderson hasn’t taught the young men – and they are young, as the team has just two seniors – about life, nothing will. Calhoun said the staff tried everything to help them along. The players were there to support their teammates, and to a man they say that this helped them get closer.
“It’s brought us close together. Anytime you go through life-changing events, it really makes you closer as a team,” said Anderson, who added that he and Price have talked a lot about what they went through.
The team chemistry will certainly help next season if everyone is back. Villanueva is expected to declare for the NBA Draft, which has long thought to be a foregone conclusion since he declared out of high school. But everyone else is expected back, and with only little-used Sami Ameziane and Jason Baisch graduating and at least three good recruits coming in, expectations will be very high in Storrs next fall. There will also be the knowledge that these players battled through everything that was thrown at them, already making them a battle-tested crew.
