The best resume in college basketball belongs to the Arizona Wildcats, and the second-best isn’t within shouting distance of Tommy Lloyd’s team.
Following Wednesday night’s 71-67 road triumph over No. 3 UConn, Arizona became just the third team in the AP poll era — and the first since 1989 — to have multiple wins over top-three opponents in its first five games of the season.
Behind the electric play of freshman Koa Peat, ‘Zona made a statement on opening night by toppling reigning national champion — and then-No. 3 Florida — at the Hall of Fame Series in Las Vegas.
Sandwiched in between their bookend victories over third-ranked teams was also a 69-65 win over chief rival and 15th-ranked UCLA. They have also hammered Utah Tech and Northern Arizona in a pair of buy games.
They almost certainly won’t be, but Arizona should be the No. 1 team in the country when the new Associated Press Top 25 poll is released on Monday. Their outrageous early resume more than justifies it.
There’s something strange about watching the Wildcats play basketball though, something that almost makes the experience feel … wrong.
In the midst of the ongoing three-point revolution at all levels of basketball, the Wildcats do almost all of their damage inside the arc.
That’s not hyperbole. After nearly three full weeks of play, Arizona ranks 360th out of 365 Division-I teams when it comes to the percentage of shots taken from behind the three-point line. They made only two in their win over Florida and then proved it wasn’t a fluke by only making two in their win over UConn a couple weeks later.
The inside attack was on full display against the Huskies in a game where ‘Zona got 45 percent of its shots at the rim and 30 percent of its shots from — avert your eyes, analytics enthusiasts — the midrange. UConn took the more modern approach of attempting 21 percent of its shots at the rim and 52 percent from beyond the arc.
Against Florida, it was even stranger. The Wildcats attempted just five shots from beyond the arc, making two.
After the game, Lloyd says taking only five triples wasn’t necessarily the game plan, but he wasn’t upset about it.
“If you shoot five threes and you can attempt 38 free-throws … I mean, I don’t know,” Lloyd said. “I know you guys are probably all smarter in analytics than I am, but that puts a lot of pressure on a defense. You know what happens when you shoot a free-throw? They foul you. And those fouls add up. And then they get deeper into their bench. Guys in foul trouble get a little bit more tentative, they can’t be as aggressive. There are lots of ways to win a game.”
The strangest thing about all this is that Arizona, when it does shoot the three, shoots it pretty well. The Wildcats are knocking down the outside shot at a 37.3 percent rate, good for 73rd-best in the country. Three key players on the roster — Jaden Bradley, Dwayne Aristode and Anthony Dell’Orso — are all hitting the three at a better than 40 percent clip. Aristode, a freshman from the Netherlands, drilled 6-of-9 in AU’s win over Northern Arizona.
Lloyd’s refusal to adhere to modern standards exists beyond his disregard of the three-point shot.
In the win over UCLA, things got even more anti-modern basketball. In addition to having Peat — a bruising 6’8 freshman who looks more like he’s 28 than 18 — Lloyd played starting center Motiejus Krivas and backup center Tobe Awaka (a starter last season) on the court together for a total of 19 minutes. The two center lineup frustrated the Bruins to no end in the game’s closing minutes, and helped Arizona put together seven consecutive stops that fueled a late comeback.
So, to sum up, the team with the best early resume in college basketball …
—Is heavily reliant on three freshmen, including one who has become the face of the team.
—Shoots fewer three-pointers than all but four teams in Division-I.
—Isn’t afraid to go long stretches with two centers on the floor at the same time, alongside a 6’8 power forward.
All of this flies in the face of what pretty much every other top 15 team/program in the sport is doing.
The big (and absurdly early) question is whether or not it can work when things matter the most.
This isn’t the first time that an Arizona team coached by Lloyd has fit the “shoots the three well but doesn’t take a ton of them” statistical profile. In each of his first three seasons on the job, the Wildcats ranked in the nation’s top 75 in three-point percentage but ranked 183rd or lower in percentage of shots taken from beyond the arc. The formula has helped AU win four conference championships under Lloyd and earn a 1-seed, a pair of 2-seeds and a 4-seed in four NCAA Tournament appearances.
What it hasn’t done is allowed the Wildcats to advance beyond the Sweet 16. Arizona hasn’t played in a regional final since 2015, and more notably, hasn’t been to a Final Four since 2001. One of the nation’s proudest fan bases is desperate to change that … whether it comes via taking 40 three-pointers or no three-pointers at all.
