Connecticut
Marquette runs into wall in Big East tournament final. Now Golden Eagles need to get healthy.
NEW YORK – It was always going to be a tall task for the Marquette men’s basketball team in the Big East tournament championship game on Saturday night.
The Golden Eagles were playing their third game in three days, all without their most important player in floor general Tyler Kolek. The first two games were grueling, physical affairs that left many MU players limping and bandaged. Oh, and the Golden Eagles were playing one of the best teams in the nation in second-ranked Connecticut, which boasts a matchup nightmare in 7-foot-3 behemoth Donovan Clingan.
So it wasn’t surprising that the third-seeded Golden Eagles, ranked No. 10 in the country, ran out of gas in a 73-57 loss to the top-seeded Huskies at Madison Square Garden.
“I thought our guys had phenomenal fight,” MU head coach Shaka Smart said. “Went toe-to-toe with a team that’s probably played better than anyone in college basketball.”
Box score: Connecticut 73, Marquette 67
Donovan Clingan too much to handle
MU held Connecticut scoreless for the first six minutes and 33 seconds. But MU only had a 2-0 advantage by the time the Huskies scored a field goal.
The Huskies finally clicked into gear, and they shot 17 for 27 (63%) in the second half to pull away.
“Just running out of steam,” MU’s David Joplin said. “I think we guarded them extremely well the first half, and we just have to keep up those same efforts throughout the game. It just made it difficult as time went on.”
Clingan finished with 22 points and 16 rebounds. He is the first player since Georgetown legend Patrick Ewing in 1984 to have at least 20 points and 15 rebounds in a Big East final.
“He puts you in a bind as a team defensively because it’s hard to guard him with one guy,” Smart said. “And the way we defend pick-and-rolls, sometimes smaller guys get on him, and that’s a problem. But he does that to a lot of people.”
Oso Ighodaro joins other banged-up Marquette players like Stevie Mitchell
MU won the Big East tournament last season, and this season the Golden Eagles players and coaches have said the most important thing is a deep run in the NCAA Tournament.
How healthy the Golden Eagles will be when they play next week is the biggest question, with the roster largely made up of the walking wounded.
“When you play in this league with the physicality with which teams are allowed to play, there’s going to be a lot of different bumps and bruises and things that come up,” Smart said.
Kolek, the unanimous all-Big East first-team player and likely consensus All-American, sits atop the list of concerns. He missed his sixth straight games since suffering and oblique injury on Feb. 28, but Smart said before the Golden Eagles opened Big East tournament play “the plan is absolutely for him to play next week.”
Another injury cropped up on Saturday when big man Oso Ighodaro banged his left knee in the second half. Smart pulled Ighodaro with just over seven minutes remaining as a precaution.
“He was struggling getting up and down the floor, so I took him out because he didn’t look like he was moving well,” Smart said.
Ighodaro did not want to make a big deal about it.
“I’m good,” Ighodaro said in the MU locker room. “I just hit my knee a little bit. I’m good”
MU starting guard Stevie Mitchell was wincing as he moved around the locker room. He played with his left shoulder wrapped after taking a wicked hit while drawing an offensive foul against Providence in the semifinals Friday.
“Warrior,” Smart said. “That’s the status update on him. He’ll probably play in our next game. Not probably, almost definitely. But he’s also banged up. He’s got an assortment of different things.”
The injury report doesn’t stop there. Chase Ross, elevated to the starting lineup in Kolek’s absence, aggravated a nagging left leg injury in the semifinals.
MU finds out its NCAA Tournament matchup on Sunday. There will be a lot of ice and rehab for the Golden Eagles before they take the court in the first round on Thursday or Friday.
“Nobody is 100% at this time of year,” Mitchell said. “I think we need to take these next few days to get our bodies right. Get back to as close to 100% as they can be. That’ll be good for us.”
Marquette turns attention to March Madness
Despite the maladies and the loss in the title game, there were positives for the Golden Eagles from their time in New York.
Freshman guard Zaide Lowery had some nice moments with more playing time because of Kolek’s injury, including five points in 14 minutes against Connecticut. He showed he wasn’t intimidated by playing in front of a sellout crowd at an arena known as “The Mecca of Basketball.”
“Just really be ready, stay ready,” Lowery said. “Once you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.
“Came in this weekend, did the best I could to help my team win. We came up short, but we got bigger things ahead of us.”
Kam Jones and Ighodaro made the all-tournament team, along with Clingan, St. John’s guard Daniss Jenkins and Providence guard Devin Carter. The Huskies’ Tristen Newton, who had 13 points and 10 assists against MU, was named most outstanding player.
Jones scored a team-high 13 points against the Huskies, and he had 54 over his three games at Madison Square Garden.
MU hasn’t been to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2013. Jones wants this team to end the drought.
“We want to be playing our best basketball every game, starting with the first round,” Jones said. “It’s single elimination, and it’s non-negotiable to bring your best every game in March Madness.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Donovan Clingan helps UConn beat Marquette 73-57 in Big East final
Connecticut
Person dead, 3 others hospitalized after fire in Bridgeport
A person has died and three others were taken to the hospital after a house fire in Bridgeport Monday evening.
City officials said they responded to a reported structure fire on Connecticut Avenue just before 5 p.m.
Fire officials said three people were taken to the hospital for evaluation. The extent of their injuries is unknown.
Authorities said one person died in the fire, but their identity has not yet been released.
The Red Cross is relocating four children and four adults. The Bridgeport Fire Marshal’s Office is working with Connecticut State Police Fire and Explosion investigators to determine the cause.
No additional information was immediately available.
Connecticut
Pedestrian struck on I-95 in Milford has serious injuries
A pedestrian has serious injuries after being struck while on Interstate 95 in Milford over the weekend.
Dispatchers received a call about a pedestrian hit on I-95 South around 6:30 p.m. Sunday.
Fire officials said a car sideswiped the pedestrian’s car while he was attempting to put fuel in it.
The pedestrian suffered serious leg injuries in the collision and he was transported to Bridgeport Hospital for treatment.
The collision is under investigation. Anyone with information or anyone who may have witnessed the collision is asked to call State Police at (203) 696-2500.
Connecticut
Connecticut’s time for energy investment is now – if state leaders get on board
As a 15-year veteran of the utility industry, I can tell you with certainty there’s nowhere like Connecticut. In other states, when utility companies receive downgrades in their credit rating, regulators and consumer advocates haul them into hearings, demanding to know their plans to rectify them.
Not so in Connecticut, where regulators themselves are named as the reason for the downgrades, and policymakers like the Office of Consumer Counsel and the Chairs of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee work overtime to provide political cover.
Meanwhile, the scope of these downgrades – from S&P and Moody’s, two of the most respected financial institutions in the world – extend statewide, from two Avangrid companies, Eversource and all its subsidiaries, to even a small water company.
Whatever the political rhetoric, the impacts are serious and the damage long-term. Building a grid for Connecticut’s future will require billions in new investment over the decades to come, and with the downgrades warning investors to be increasingly skeptical of Connecticut utilities, every single dollar just got more expensive.
The state has a long list of goals for its economy and clear objectives for its utilities: build a modern, sustainable, reliable, resilient, renewable, innovative electric grid capable of supporting massive capacity increases from electrification and data centers. Alienating the investment community does nothing to further those goals; it only makes them less attainable.
But until PURA and state policymakers abandon their anti-utility bias, they will continue to miss today’s golden opportunity to build the energy system of tomorrow –- an opportunity other states are rigorously pursuing. Instead, the excellent reliability that customers rely on, built through a long legacy of investment, will be whittled away even as costs continue to rise.
This, to a question that Sen. Norm Needleman and Rep. Jonathan Steinberg raise in their editorial, is why companies like ours “care” if our credit rating is downgraded. We are not so short-sighted as to shrug off the consequences of higher costs for our customers.
But even more significant are the consequences to long-term energy investment in Connecticut. Utilities are some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the country. We rely on selling bonds to finance safe, reliable, high-quality service through investments like new substations, battery storage, flood walls, microgrids and more.
Downgrades signal to investors they should pull their loans, leaving us with insufficient capital to advance these innovations. Instead, utilities are forced to put what limited capital we can raise (through higher premiums on our bonds) into the most basic, fundamental projects, like storm restoration efforts or pole replacements after traffic accidents.
Accepting – and even incentivizing – PURA to enable meager investments to support only the most basic service puts Connecticut out of step with our neighbors, as other northeastern states are doing the hard work of system planning for the future. It’s no coincidence that Eversource is putting forward 30-year investment plans in Massachusetts while pulling $500 million in investments from Connecticut. Nor should it be surprising that Avangrid company New York State Electric & Gas (NYSEG) is building two 1-megawatt battery energy storage systems that tap directly into New York substations, a major resiliency investment, while nothing of the sort is happening in Connecticut.
Regulators in Massachusetts and New York are far from easy or passive. They have high standards that utilities must work hard to meet, and they do not get everything they ask for, as Needleman and Steinberg baselessly claim is our demand.
What Massachusetts and New York do is set the rules of the road for utility companies. They set clear standards of performance they expect from utility companies – in everything from the level of detail in rate cases to their forward-looking investment plans – and they hold them accountable.
That is not the case in Connecticut. Legislators can obfuscate, downplay, or even offer fictitious conspiracy theories -– most incredibly, that we would pay credit rating agencies, which are independent referees under federal law, to downgrade our credit ratings when downgrades are good for no one.
But none of these political games change the fact that energy companies cannot invest in a state in which PURA puts politically expedient rate cuts over its stated objectives. Nor will they alleviate the underinvestment these policymakers are apparently willing to accept in favor of the fabrication that PURA is “simply holding utilities accountable.”
I fear Connecticut’s energy infrastructure, and the economy it’s built on, will be left behind as other states move forward with a clear vision. The golden opportunity for investment in the energy future is now, and we are at serious risk of missing it as our regulators and policymakers prioritize waging political war on the state’s utilities. The longer they dally, the more likely it is that PURA’s actions and inaction will leave us in the dark.
Charlotte Ancel is the Vice President of Investor Relations at Avangrid, the parent company of United Illuminating, Connecticut Natural Gas, and Southern Connecticut Gas.
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