Dan Hurley has spoken honestly about his wife Andrea’s reaction to the Lakers offering her husband the head coaching role.
The UConn coach turned down LA’s six-year, $70 million contract offer to chase a three-peat in the national championship with the Huskies.
The 51-year-old got brutally honest about how the whole situation, including the wild media circus, affected his wife.
“She was like crying in the beginning,” Hurley said during an appearance on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on Thursday. “I think initially, the first couple days of it, she got violently angry and emotional, not like hitting me and stuff… she got emotional like, ‘I can’t believe you’re bringing this. Our life is so great… it’s perfect. Our lives couldn’t be better and now you’re bringing this sh*t.
“So, she was bad in the beginning but then she warmed up to it when we got out there and she met [Lakers GM] Rob [Pelinka] and she met Jeanie [Buss] and felt the weather. We drove around Manhattan Beach and just met the people mostly. And she saw the vision of it. She was into it.
“But then when we got back to Connecticut without having made a decision and we got back home and we both flipped back [to UConn].”
Hurley went on to explain that he would have taken more time to mull the offer over, but put a deadline on the decision.
“[The decision] was weighing on me and my wife and my two sons and our whole family,” Hurley said, adding that things had “become too much of a circus” in the media.
He also shut down the rumor that he used the Lakers coaching offer as leverage to get a better contract with the Huskies.
“One of the worst takes I’ve heard is that this is a leverage play by me to improve my situation at UConn,” Hurley told Le Batard.. “I don’t need leverage here. We’ve won back-to-back national championships at this place. This was never a leverage situation for me.
“I’ve had a contract in place here for a couple of weeks. And the final part, in terms of salary, has been done for a while. There are some other parts, like NIL and staff salary and some different things, that I want adjusted and I’m not comfortable with. But the sense of the idea that this was some conspiracy to get me a sweeter deal at UConn is just, it’s lazy.”
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