INDIANAPOLIS — All things considered, what a find.
One play, amid hundreds of film clips over the course of a college season. Two, maybe three seconds from a meaningless Big Ten tournament blowout.
But in those few ticks, UConn’s coaches saw … something. Something special. Something unharnessed.
Something worth chasing.
“That just kind of jumped off at us,” UConn associate head coach Kimani Young said. “(If) a guy with that kind of raw talent can come into our program, we don’t know what he can become.”
How about the best player on a UConn team vying for the program’s third national title in the last four seasons?
Senior center Tarris Reed Jr. has become the latest in a line of dominant UConn big men to shoulder a heavy load while carrying the Huskies’ championship aspirations. From Emeka Okafor to Hasheem Thabeet, Adama Sanogo to Donovan Clingan, it’s impossible to explain UConn’s rich hoops history without retracing those gigantic steps. And against Michigan — the school Reed played for in his first two seasons of college basketball — the 6-foot-10, 265-pounder has the chance on Monday night to cement himself as an iconic UConn forward.
“Our season is going to be determined by what Tarris Reed does, which Tarris Reed we get, does the light switch go on for Tarris Reed,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “I’ve been saying it for months and months and months.”
Reed’s potential has become glaringly obvious during this NCAA Tournament. From UConn’s first game against No. 15 seed Furman, when Reed dropped an absurd 31 points and 27 rebounds to become the first player since Houston’s Elvin Hayes in 1968 to post a 30-25 game in March Madness, the Huskies have gone as far as Reed can take them. He has led UConn in scoring in four of its five postseason games, averaging 20.8 points and 13 rebounds in the process, and is coming off a team-best 17 points and 11 boards against No. 3 seed Illinois in the Final Four.
All of which couldn’t have come at a better, or more necessary, time.
“He’s put on a show in this tournament,” said Michigan coach Dusty May, who was hired by the Wolverines the same spring Reed left Ann Arbor. “He deserves the success.”
Tarris Reed Jr. shoots a layup over Zvonimir Ivisic of the Illinois Fighting Illini in the first half of Saturday’s Final Four game at Lucas Oil Stadium. (Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
Especially after all the struggle, all the uncertainty, it took for Reed to reach this point.
Reed hasn’t always been this dominant. That dunk against Penn State from the 2024 Big Ten tournament that caught the UConn coaching staff’s eye in his final game with the Wolverines? It was a flash, sure, but only that.
And for most of Reed’s first two years in college, that was the book on him: Talented, yes, but a little all over the place.
“When he first came here, he had a lot of width to his game — he could do a lot of things — but he didn’t have a lot of depth,” said UConn graduate assistant Rich Kelly, now in his third season in Storrs. “The coaches really helped him understand where he could be great — and truly great, which is not a word to use for every single player.”
But that process isn’t easy. Playing for Hurley, you might have heard, can be about as fun as wrestling an ornery porcupine. The coach’s whole schtick relies on constantly poking and prodding players, making them intentionally uncomfortable. Testing the limits of how far someone can be pushed, so that when they’re in a pressure situation, it feels relaxed relative to daily experience.
In Reed’s case, that meant getting someone with all the physical ability in the world to wrap his mind around what he’s capable of.
Reed’s former head coach at Michigan, Juwan Howard, always preached that basketball was 20 percent physical and 80 percent mental, but it took Hurley putting Reed through hell for him to actually understand that.
“It was hard when someone else sees your potential, and you don’t even see it yourself,” Reed said. “You could even doubt or not believe yourself. But that’s how much Coach believed in me. Just looking back at the days of practices where it was tough and difficult, I mean, it was just out of love, and how much he wanted us to be successful — and that included me being successful.”
That is why Reed picked UConn out of the transfer portal. At Michigan, Howard had shown him tape of Sanogo, the starting center on Hurley’s first title team and the Most Outstanding Player of the 2023 Final Four. Reed was amazed at how Sanogo, who averaged 19.7 points and 9.8 rebounds during UConn’s six postseason wins in 2023, took over.
“How physical he was ducking in, how simple his game was — and how effective it was,” Reed said. “That played a part in me coming to UConn. Like, this guy’s 6-8, being this dominant? Imagine: I’m three inches taller, you know? Longer wingspan. Like, what could I do?”
Plenty.
If he stuck it out long enough to see the fruits of UConn’s process, that is. Which, Reed admits, almost didn’t happen.
After last season, in which Reed came off the bench for a yo-yo UConn team that went 24-11 and fell well short of three-peating, a breakup was very much on the table. “It was a point where we were about to split ways after the season, after my junior year,” Reed said. And it would’ve been easier, in all likelihood, for Reed to leave Storrs, and the constant ambush designed to maximize his natural gifts.
Then Reed spoke to his inner circle. Sat with his thoughts, crying, in his room. Started journaling — a Hurley habit — about the pros and cons of running it back with the Huskies.
The longer he marinated on the choice, the more apparent it became that there was only one viable route for Reed to get where he wanted.
“When I started writing it down in my journal, it was pretty obvious that, yo, if you want all this — you want to go to the NBA, you want to do all this — you have to stay at UConn,” Reed said. “I was just wrestling with myself for the longest time knowing that: how tough it was going to be to come back for my senior year. Like, going into one of the hardest years of my life, and then choosing to go back? That’s not easy to do.”
Over the summer, not long after Reed opted to return as the Huskies’ centerpiece, he got to spend some time with Clingan, who swung through Storrs for a visit. Hurley specifically set the two up together after one practice, so Reed could learn firsthand some of the habits that turned ‘Cling Kong’ into a shot-blocking star of the 2024 title team.
Mostly, those were little details.
The best angles for setting screens, an essential ingredient in UConn’s movement-based offense.
When to roll in ball-screen scenarios, and how to improve the timing on those plays that long eluded Reed.
How to read the floor as a passer, especially when defenses collapsed on him and forced a kickout to open shooters.
“The way he was reading the floor,” Reed added, “was just so different than how I saw the game.”
Clingan also gave Reed a welcome reminder about Hurley: “There’s days where you’re gonna want to quit, but you stick with it … and you’re going to see fruit.”
Five straight games worth of it, as it turns out.
The proof is in the work, which Reed finally, fully leaned into.
Backup guard Malachi Smith, who lives with Reed, said the big man has their whole fridge full of “weird nutrition stuff,” like beetroot and tart cherry juice. At the team cafeteria, Reed always opts for grilled chicken over fried. He often logs 12-hour days — longer than any other player — at the UConn facility, Kelly said, rarely leaving the gym before 9 p.m. and never before completing his full stretching routine.
“I give Tarris a lot of credit,” Young said. “Change takes some time, but fortunately for us and for him, that change has happened.”
Now comes Reed’s opportunity to prove just how far he’s come, duking it out against a Michigan frontcourt that has been compared to Space Jam’s Monstars, featuring 7-foot-3 center Aday Mara plus 6-foot-9 forwards Morez Johnson Jr. and Yaxel Lendeborg.
In many ways, it’s the very challenge Reed has been building toward for four years.
“You have to go out with everything you have,” Reed said. “Go out there, swinging for the fences. You throw in as many punches as you can. You’re trying to fight for the win.”
And, especially at UConn, for immortality.