STORRS, Conn. — Two years ago, the UConn men were coming off a stinging first-round loss in the NCAA Tournament and the roster was in upheaval; players impatient about development were moving on. A conversation with Dan Hurley evolved into a long lament about the new ways of college basketball, ending with a vow to “adapt or die.”

Perhaps in April 2022, with UConn six years removed from its last victory in an NCAA Tournament game, Hurley had to enter the transfer portal with a miner’s cap, searching for players who could upgrade the roster and fit his approach. Whatever, he found them, and landed them.

In came Tristen Newton, Hassan Diarra, Nahiem Alleyne and Joey Calcaterra to supplement the core of players he developed and the Huskies won the national championship. With five players departing, Hurley pulled Cam Spencer out of the portal to supplement his returners and incoming freshman and there you had the repeat, in even more dominant fashion.

Now, don’t let the recent self-effacing posts fool you, Hurley has his pick of portal prizes these days, and he convinced the freshmen who didn’t play much to stick around. He emerged from the closed portal on Thursday looking, sounding nothing like the exhausted, beleaguered figure he portrayed on social media, or appeared to be 24 short months ago. “Reloading, not rebuilding” is a fancy, often empty slogan a lot of teams use. It’s not inflated rhetoric for UConn men’s basketball, it’s the mode of operation.

“We’re banking heavily on player development,” Hurley said, “and then we’ve gone for strategic maneuvers based on players we really believe can come here and thrive and play great. ... The way that we’re landing our players gives us confidence that we have a chance to keep doing what we’re doing.”

That, of course, would be the oft-mentioned “three-peat,” or as Hurley called his goal in the moments after the championship: a “dynasty in modern times.” This a reference to John Wooden’s UCLA teams, winners of 10 championships between 1964 and ’75, including a “seven-peat” from 1967-73. In those days, players played four years, not one or six, nearly always stayed in one place and a program was built and maintained in the classic sense, with a pipeline of players. In that case a nearly seamless transition from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Bill Walton. Not easy, but not complicated.

That kind of program disappeared long ago, and with it the ability to maintain a dynasty in the decades of the one- or two-and-done. Nor can a dynasty be forged by trying to catch lightning in a Gatorade jug year after year in the portal.

“We’re not bringing in seven players from the portal and throwing them against the wall and see what sticks,” Hurley said. “It’s very important to us that we’ve kept all the players that were returning here. We were very cognizant with that, not recruiting too much. Last year, it was one of the most efficient basketball teams in the last 25 years that they couldn’t crack the rotation on.”

So Hurley is starting with an old-time player-development pipeline, convincing his freshmen — Solomon Ball, Jayden Ross, Jaylin Stewart and Youssouf Singare — to stay with the program despite their limited minutes, reminding them and their families throughout the season that they were wanted. Sure, on a championship team, it should be easy to get players to understand that they had to wait their turn, but look at the mass defections elsewhere and see how hard that can be.

Hurley is using the portal and NIL to keep experienced players in the program, like Hassan Diarra, back for a fifth season, Samson Johnson, who will complete the journey from little-used freshman to senior starter, and perhaps Alex Karaban, weighing whether to return as a junior. He’s attracting high-level freshmen, the latest Liam McNeely, and using the portal to fill specific needs, Tarris Reed Jr. from Michigan, Aidan Mahaney from St. Mary’s. All avenues of player procurement are employed.

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