Fire and Ice: The Dynamic Duo of Tristen Newton and Dan Hurley Lead UConn to Double Title
GLENDALE, Arizona — Tristen Newton was put through a standard shooting workout by the UConn coaching staff at his first Connecticut session following his transfer from East Carolina in the summer of 2022. The drill involved making 50 3-pointers in a timed format to see how quickly one could complete it.
Newton got to 37 … and started cramping in his right arm.
Then he heard coach Dan Hurley holler across the gym: “Just throw it up left-handed, then! Keep going.”
Newton — who had no high-major offers out of his high school in El Paso, Texas — was taken aback by his new coach’s approach. By, really, the way he burned red-hot. “We all know Coach Hurley,” says associate head coach Kimani Young, Newton’s primary recruiter. “He’s wound pretty tight.” Newton couldn’t have been more opposite personality-wise. “Chill,” is how Newton’s brother, Jawuan, describes him — the type of dude to nap the day of the national championship game, to treat a career-defining contest “like a normal day.”
So, culture shock, basically.
“He’s not from the Northeast,” Young adds, laughing. “You know what I mean? He’s not from New York, he’s not from New Jersey.”
Interpretation: Unlike the coach he had agreed to play for, who would pound him to dust. Hurley’s realization that he needed a point guard and the staff’s memory of a then-freshman scoring 25 points against Connecticut in February 2020—during the Huskies’ tenure in the American Athletic Conference—were the main reasons UConn sought Newton in the first place. Furthermore, Young, a former player under famous coach Don Haskins at Texas-El Paso, was aware of the high-caliber players in the area. He had kept an eye on Newton, and after two of his contemporaries praised the 6-foot-5 guard after seeing him compete in the 2022 AAC tournament, Young launched UConn’s recruitment of the player. Hurley emphasized that he saw Newton not just as a gifted scorer, but as a true point guard, the type of connective tissue who could unlock the Huskies’ offense.
From a basketball perspective, both coach and player were sold.
But you can’t always know how personalities will mesh — or not — until a kid gets on campus.
“A little fire-and-ice,” assistant coach Luke Murray says of Newton and Hurley’s duality. “Dan is super intense. Tristen is a little more laid-back. Initially, that was something that was hard for (Hurley) to reason with. It was like, ‘I don’t see on your face what I am feeling right now.’”
Two years later, we find ourselves in a large locker room at State Farm Stadium. Hurley’s Huskies became the greatest team of all time when they defeated Purdue 75-60 to win their second straight national championship. But who was the other key player on those two championship teams? That would be Newton, then. Before becoming an absolute supernova this season, he started for Hurley’s first championship team the previous year. In addition to leading this team in points and assists, Newton also finished second in rebounds and helped them record the biggest overall point difference in NCAA Tournament history. He received recognition for his achievements as a First-Team All-American, the Bob Cousy Award, which is given to the best point guard in the country each year, and the title of Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four on Monday night in the desert after recording a game-high 20 points, seven assists, five rebounds, and zero turnovers. It is a unique legacy in a place where there are many others. It is the kind of season and last game that makes you referenced alongside icons like Shabazz Napier, Khalid El-Amin, and Kemba Walker.
“As good a run as anyone who’s worn the uniform,” Hurley says. “Maybe the best run ever as a UConn guard.”
So, the real question then: How did Newton, and Hurley, go from their personality conflict … to this?
“We met in the middle,” Newton says, “and obviously, it changed my life.”
This angle of T-New’s finish #MadeForMarch | #MixForSix pic.twitter.com/fhZbUDdXw5
— UConn Men’s Basketball (@UConnMBB) April 9, 2024
Newton was a component of the puzzle last season, long before Hurley’s second-place squad rewrote the rules on how to blow out postseason opponents. In December 2022, his first full month of play, he only averaged 6.1 points, 4.6 assists, and 3.9 rebounds per game, along with 2.6 turnovers and a pitiful 28.6 percent shooting from three-point range. He started 38 of 39 games.
The jump in level of basketball, clearly — from the AAC to the big, bad Big East — was a thing. But so was Newton figuring out to click with his new coaching staff, and them understanding how to get the best out of him.
“It started off rocky,” Newton says. “We had a lot of meetings (about) what we needed to do to meet in the middle.”
Hurley is always on target; in the last minutes of a game, when his team is up 25 points, he will lash out at officials. Newton isn’t. Hurley only knew one way, especially coming from a family of walking dynamite sticks like his own. Hurley and his team would frequently phone Newton’s parents, Montreal and Erika, and discuss their son with them in addition to their meetings with Newton. They would mine them for details regarding Newton’s philosophy and methods of operation.
“He’s extremely bright, extremely tough, extremely competitive, and extremely clutch. As a parent, I wish he would show sometimes — outwardly show — more of that stuff, because it’s in there,” UConn assistant Tom Moore says. “But everybody’s wired differently, you know? And his dad helped our coaching staff through a lot of that, and his mother, in our conversations with them.”
Hurley eventually came to the realization that he and Newton shared the same guts when Newton began to play consistently and at a nearly all-league level, becoming the first player in program history to record two triple-doubles in a single season. What if his new point guard did not show it off in the same manner?
“It’s important for anybody in any relationship not to make the person be like you. And that’s the fault a lot of people make in coaching and teaching,” says UConn legend Ray Allen, who talks regularly with Hurley. “The people that you preside over, that you guide, don’t make them you. Just help them with who they are, and teach them about fundamentals and growing up and being accountable — things like that — and they’ll guide themselves into being a great version of who they are. The best version of themselves.”
For Hurley, that comprehension came more gradually. However, after losing six of their eight games from late December to early January 2023, UConn converted back into a rocket ship on a moonshot trajectory, and one of the main reasons for this was Newton’s rise, particularly the way he unlocked Andre Jackson Jr.
At the end of the day, Hurley only cared about winning. It’s not that he caved or softened to Newton: because, as forward Alex Karaban says, “Coach Hurley’s never going to change who he is.” But he did come to understand that Newton’s inner makeup mattered more than forcing him to fake volcanic blow-ups. Because that, also, wasn’t happening.
“Look, Dan is who he is,” says athletic director David Benedict, “but Dan coaches every kid the way they need to be coached. He’s smart enough and experienced enough to know that sometimes, he’s gotta back down or slow down. Sometimes he’s got to light things on fire — and that’s what he does.”
With Newton, it was the former.
And once he leaned into that?
When it counted most, Newton played perhaps his finest game ever. In the national championship game, he led the team with 19 points, 10 rebounds, 4 assists, and 2 steals over San Diego State for UConn.
Last offseason, after Hurley lost three starters, he knew he’d have to put more on Newton’s plate. And after their championship run together, their relationship had never been better.
Because of this, the coach and his point guard were forced to meet in the middle once more following a “secret” scrimmage loss to Virginia that sent smoke billowing out of Hurley’s ears. Hurley might test the boundaries once more, but only this time, with their combined experiences banked. He required more yet.
And by then, with the benefit of a year in Storrs? Maybe some of that Northeastern grit did rub off on Newton.
“I loved to see him smile,” Newton says, grinning, “and I’m sure he loves to see me yell and do all that other stuff.”
Both men giving an inch was enough to make this Newton’s team. “Our best player,” Young says. “He helped carry us to this championship.” Throughout the season, UConn was a buzzsaw, and Newton controlled the speed at which the blades whirled. He stepped up his game against Purdue in the second half, and the Huskies quickly grew their advantage from six points at halftime to sixteen, with two alley-oop dunks from Newton to Samson Johnson serving as a major catalyst.
Hurley replaced Newton and the rest of UConn’s players with 36.9 seconds remaining to secure the win. Despite having met much earlier, the two men gave each other a bear hug.
Moore, who has witnessed both men go from being outsiders to championship centers, summed up their connection in a way that only an insider can after 30 minutes.
“(Newton’s) grown so much, maybe more than any player that we’ve ever had over a two-year period,” Moore says. “And it was neat to hear Coach say, like, Tristen taught him a lot as a coach: ‘They don’t all have to do it exactly the way I want them to do it.’”
(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)