UConn Men’s Basketball Receives Devastating Injury Update

When it rains, it pours. While the outlook for UConn Men’s Basketball (2-4) has been cloudy since the onset of the season, it’s not about to improve anytime soon.

Alterique Gilbert, Mamadou Diarra, and Terry Larrier have all officially been ruled out for the remainder of the 2016-2017 campaign, according to a release issued by the men’s basketball program on Tuesday afternoon.

Gilbert (10.3 PPG, 2.3 SPG), who was sidelined for the Maui Invitational after suffering a dislocated left shoulder against Loyola Marymount on November 17th, has now been diagnosed with a torn labrum.

Gilbert was a consensus Top-35 incoming recruit nationally and headlined what had been the country’s 9th-ranked recruiting class by both Rivals and ESPN. He also represented the closest thing to a pure point guard on the roster.

Diarra, another member of the vaunted freshman class who went as far as nicknaming themselves “Top 5,” was unable to play this season due to a nagging knee injury.

It turns out he is dealing with significant patellofemoral syndrome, which in layman’s terms means “intense knee discomfort.” The 6-foot-8 Queens native, who will at least initially elect to rest and rehab rather than undergo surgery, has a relentless motor and could have helped out a Huskies team that currently ranks 293rd out of 351 Division-1 teams in Defensive Rebounding Rate, per KenPom.

Larrier, UConn’s second leading scorer at 13.5 points per game, tore his left ACL against Oklahoma State last Monday and will have surgery sometime over the next few days.

The hope is that Larrier, a VCU transfer who was UConn’s best pro prospect, will be all systems go for the start of next year (the expected recovery from a torn ACL is between 8-9 months).

A severely undermanned Huskies squad will next take the floor on Wednesday against Boston University.