Solo Ball started 2025 with the best game of his career as his hot shooting from deep led the UConn men’s basketball team to an 81-68 win over DePaul on New Year’s Day in Chicago.

Ball – part of the sophomore class coach Dan Hurley bet on in the offseason, rather than seeking out older players in the transfer portal – made a career-high seven 3-pointers on nine attempts, finishing with 22 points and six rebounds as he helped the 11th-ranked Huskies improve to 11-3 on the year and 3-0 in Big East play.

“We’re an outlier,” Hurley told the CBS Sports Network crew after the game. “We’re not a G League team or a G-League type of an organization where the roster is gonna be totally new every year. We believe in recruiting high school players and making them better and getting them on the court early in their career. Having sophomores playing against 24-year-olds is scary at times, but you can see the pay-off with a guy like Solo.”

UConn also received significant production from its three vets, as leading scorer Alex Karaban made four 3-pointers of his own to finish with 18 points, seven rebounds and three assists. Samson Johnson added 10 points inside with four assists, three rebounds, two blocks and two assists, and Hassan Diarra tallied nine assists – his sixth-straight game with seven or more – to only one turnover.

Five-star freshman Liam McNeeley scored nine points with six rebounds and three assists before landing awkwardly on his right ankle and being helped off the court, eventually limping to the locker room seven minutes into the second half and sitting the remainder of the game in a walking boot. Hurley told reporters in Chicago after the game that an MRI will be done Thursday, “Hopefully it’s just a sprain,” he said.

The game changed once McNeeley went out. A blowout in the making became a back-and-forth gritty affair, but UConn (11-3) held on for the wire-to-wire victory – it’s seventh win in a row.

UConn switched everything on defense and made an early emphasis on running DePaul off the 3-point line. The Blue Demons, a top-26 3-point shooting team in the nation entering the new year, went just 2-for-10 from beyond the arc in the first half and only attempted two 3-pointers in the second.

“We were willing to give up some of the ugly drives to the rim when we did such a great job of taking away the 3-point line, they’re one of the best 3-point shooting teams in the country, both in volume and percentage, and that was the key to the game,” Hurley said, per the TV broadcast.

DePaul missed multiple opportunities and went almost six minutes without a field goal while UConn took advantage and built its lead inside the paint. Tarris Reed Jr., who scored four points with four rebounds in his first five-minute stint, swatted point guard Conor Enright’s layup attempt off the glass and the ball found McNeeley for transition 3-pointer.

CJ Gunn answered with DePaul’s first made 3 around the nine-minute mark, but the Huskies continued to take advantage of opportunities in transition as Diarra – UConn’s quarterback – set up Johnson for a dunk and finished his own fastbreak layup to force a timeout from DePaul’s first-year coach Chris Holtmann.

Dishing eight assists in the first half, Diarra set up 3-pointers for Karaban and McNeeley before finding Ball on three of his four consecutive triples to close the half as the Huskies went into the break up by 21, 43-22.

“I was really just playing the game and letting the game come to me,” Ball told reporters in Chicago. “I didn’t really shoot a shot until probably like 10 minutes into the game, so I was just trying to make sure that I was letting the game come to me and not force any shots. I think that propelled me through the rest of the game.”

UConn dominated the opening period inside and out, translating its 9-5 advantage on the offensive glass into a 9-2 difference in second chance points. The Huskies, defensively focused on the 3-point line, made more 3s in the first half (8-for-15) than the Blue Demon’s did shots from the field (7-for-26).

Ball made his fifth 3-pointer in a row as UConn’s defense slipped with five fouls called in the first five minutes of the second half. The Blue Demons had an 18-8 advantage in the paint over the first 11 minutes after the break as leading scorer Jacob Meyer disrupted UConn’s perimeter offense and scored all 12 of his points in the second half.

With Diarra and Ball getting into foul trouble, McNeeley exiting the game injured, UConn entered the double bonus and turned the ball over seven times with more than eight minutes left. Using 16 fastbreak points and 11 points off turnovers, DePaul cut its deficit – once as large as 22 points – to nine with 7:44 to go.

“(Moving forward, the key for us is) that ability to sustain what we did in the first half defensively, play a full 40-minute game where we get contributions from all nine guys in the rotation,” Hurley said. “And when we get a team down, we bury them. We don’t have that killer instinct like past teams, so we’ve got to find that.”

Needing a bucket to stop the Blue Demons’ run, Karaban nailed a momentum-swinging 3-pointer, Ball hit his sixth and Karaban made another – all in the span of a minute – to push the Huskies’ lead back to 14.

Ball’s seventh 3-pointer put the game out of reach with four minutes left.

UConn was outscored 46-38 in the second half, but held on for a 13-point victory. The Huskies return to action – with or without McNeeley – on Sunday with a 2 p.m. tip-off against Providence at Gampel Pavilion.

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