GLENDALE, Ariz. — During Tristen Newton’s first Connecticut practice, right after he transferred from East Carolina in the summer of 2022, UConn’s coaching staff put him through a normal shooting drill: make 50 3-pointers, timed, to see how quickly you can do 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.”
Translation: Not like the grind-you-to-dust coach he’d signed up to play for. The reason UConn wanted Newton in the first place was because Hurley recognized he needed a point guard, and the staff remembered a then-freshman dropping 25 points on Connecticut’s head in February 2020, back when the Huskies were still in the American Athletic Conference. Plus, Young — who played at Texas-El Paso for legendary coach Don Haskins — was attuned to hoopers coming out of that area; he’d kept tabs on Newton, and when two peers spoke highly of the 6-foot-5 guard after watching him play in the 2022 AAC tournament, Young began UConn’s pursuit. 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.’”
Fast-forward two years, to inside an expansive locker room in State Farm Stadium. UConn won its second consecutive national championship, a 75-60 win over Purdue, to cement Hurley’s Huskies as an all-time juggernaut — and the other man at the center of those two title teams? Well, that would be Newton. Last year, he started for Hurley’s first championship squad, before going full supernova this season. Newton led this team — which posted the best overall point differential in NCAA Tournament history — in points and assists, and was second in rebounds. For those efforts, he was named a First-Team All-American; won the Bob Cousy Award, given annually to the nation’s best point guard; and on Monday night in the desert, was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, after posting a team-high 20 points, seven assists, and five rebounds, with no turnovers. It is a one-of-one legacy in a place with plenty of those, the sort of season — and final game — that gets you mentioned in the same company as legends like Kemba Walker and Shabazz Napier and Khalid El-Amin.
“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
Last season, well before Hurley’s second title team rewrote the rulebook on how to detonate postseason opponents, Newton was a piece of the puzzle. He started 38 of 39 games, but in December 2022 — his first full month of games — he only averaged 6.1 points, 4.6 assists, and 3.9 rebounds per game, not to mention 2.6 turnovers and a dismal 28.6 percent on 3-pointers.
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 fully dialed up at all times, someone who lambasts officials when his team has a 25-point margin in a game’s waning minutes. Newton … is not. And Hurley, especially coming from the family of walking dynamite sticks that he does, only knew the one way. In addition to meeting with Newton, Hurley and his staff would regularly call Newton’s parents, Montreal and Erika, and talk to them about their son. They’d mine them for information about Newton’s mindset and how he operated.
“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.”
Eventually, as Newton found consistency and started performing at a borderline all-league level — he became the first player in program history with two triple-doubles in the same season — Hurley realized that he and Newton were made of the same guts. So what if his new point guard didn’t necessarily flaunt it the same way?
“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.”
That understanding came more slowly for Hurley. But following six UConn losses in eight games from late December to late January 2023, the Huskies turned back into a rocket ship with a moonshot trajectory — and Newton’s emergence, especially how he helped unlock Andre Jackson Jr., was a key reason why.
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?
Newton had arguably his best game when it mattered most. In UConn’s national championship win over San Diego State, he had a team-high 19 points, 10 rebounds, four assists, and two steals.
Tristen Newton and Dan Hurley hug after UConn wrapped up its second straight national title. (David J. Phillip / AP)
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.
Which is why after a “secret” scrimmage loss to Virginia, one that sent smoke billowing out of Hurley’s ears, the coach and his point guard once again had to meet in the middle. Only this time, with banked experiences together, Hurley could push the envelope again. He needed even more.
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.” UConn was a buzzsaw the entire season, and Newton determined how fast the blades spun. In the second half against Purdue, he turned up the torque — and a six-point halftime lead ballooned to 16 in the blink of an eye, the Huskies’ momentum especially keyed by a pair of alley-oop dunks from Newton to Samson Johnson.
With 36.9 seconds left and victory assured, Hurley subbed out Newton and the rest of UConn’s starters. The two men embraced in a bear hug, although they’d come together far before then.
Half an hour later, Moore — who has seen both men move from the fringes to a championship center — summed up their relationship like only someone on the inside can.
“(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)
