Last season's loss to Tennessee motivated Wildcats; Saturday, they'll get a shot at revenge

During his 33-win debut as head coach last season, Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd didn’t have a lot of losing memories to store. So the first one may have really stuck in his head.

“Sixteen to two,” Lloyd said. “Sixteen to two. That’s my memory.”

But Arizona’s 77-73 loss at Tennessee, after the Wildcats nearly made up for that shocking deficit to start that Dec. 22 game last season, foreshadowed Lloyd’s final losing memory of the season, too.

That is, the way the Wildcats were pushed around early at Knoxville was much the same as how Houston out-toughed the Wildcats over the entirety of the Cougars’ 72-60 Sweet 16 win.

Last Dec. 22 in Knoxville, the Volunteers held UA to 28% shooting in the first half and wound up outrebounding the Wildcats 40-28. Three UA players fouled out and two others picked up four fouls. UA forward Azuolas Tubelis took only six shots, scoring six points.

“I was lost,” Tubelis said, recalling the rabid atmosphere at Thompson Boling Arena. “I didn’t know what I was doing on the court.”

Almost exactly three months later in San Antonio, Houston held Arizona to 28% shooting in the first half, outrebounded the Wildcats 37-35 and, while only getting guard Kerr Kriisa in serious foul trouble, held UA to just 34.4% 2-point shooting. Meanwhile, Tubelis took eight shots … and hit none of them.

Lloyd’s comments afterward were comparable, too.

Here’s how he assessed the Tennessee game: “You’ve gotta to play with force and fundamentals. Everything has to start with toughness. You can’t tiptoe into games like this. You’re not going to get any calls if you tiptoe into them, and you’re going to get boat-raced. That’s obviously what happened at the start.”

Here’s what he said after the season, following the Houston loss and the way TCU used a similarly physical approach to take the Wildcats to overtime of a second-round NCAA Tournament game.

“I didn’t think we were a soft team, but they were physical,” Lloyd said of the two games. “So it’s, ‘Can we find a way to be a little bit more physical in some of those matchups against a TCU or a Houston to kind of increase our margin for error?’ “

The losses motivated Lloyd and his players throughout the offseason, with Tubelis mentioning how it drove him to be a tougher player and better rebounder, and Lloyd saying he would adjust both his recruiting and coaching.

With the Volunteers bringing to McKale Center on Saturday the same sort of physical approach they succeeded with last season, the ninth-ranked Wildcats (9-1) should be able to gauge exactly how much those things have happened.

The sixth-ranked Volunteers (9-1) have the nation’s most efficient defense, according to Kenpom.com, while also ranking second in offensive rebounding percentage (40.3%), effectively helping them make up for their relatively mediocre shooting.

In other words, they look a lot like they did last season. And maybe a lot like the way Houston looked last season, too.

“I know people talk a lot about Houston, for good reasons,” says UA assistant coach Riccardo Fois, who has scouted the Volunteers the past two seasons. “But they might be better than Houston was last year.”

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Not surprisingly, after UA ran over Texas A&M Corpus Christi 99-61 on Tuesday, Lloyd said he expected a “fistfight” against the Vols. When told of that remark Thursday during a meeting with reporters in Nashville, Tennessee wing Jahmai Mashack grinned.

“Yeah, I would say so,” Mashack said. “Going to practice with this team is always gonna be a battle, because we just we love to compete. We love to play hard. I think that’s really what we hold our standard to. So I think that’s a good analogy there.”

Then again, if the Volunteers didn’t play hard defensively they probably wouldn’t be anything close to the sixth-ranked team in the country. Tennessee is well below average in both two-point shooting percentage (46.0%) and 3-point percentage (32.4%).

The Vols have to stop you or they just might stop themselves.

“I do think our guys play hard,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said. “I think they know they have to. We talked about it a lot. What we want to do (is have) the identity of being a defensive team. Hopefully we can get our offense going the way I think we’re capable of. But we’ve got a group of guys who are trying to be the best defensive team, best rebounding team we can be.

“If you do that, we truly believe that it’s going to give us a chance to be in most games, win most games. But there’s nights when you run up against people that you can guard and they still make some shots — and Arizona is certainly capable of doing that.”

There have been moments where the Wildcats can’t even take those shots, much less make them. In the first five minutes of its game at Tennessee last seasons, Arizona took only four shots while turning the ball over five times.

At the end of those five minutes, as Lloyd noted, Tennessee led 16-2.

“Well, I’m the positive guy,” Fois said, chuckling when told of Lloyd’s memory. “So if he remembers the 16-2, I remember that after that we basically won the game. They imposed their physicality on us early. Then we had to adjust and once we adjusted, it was a good game, back and forth. We could have won it.

“But we missed shots at the end, good shots. … and then the other thing I remember we were because of our lack of physicality early, we were in big foul trouble with our bigs.”

So how much more physical have the Wildcats become since that game? How much more since the Houston game?

They’ll find out Saturday.

“We want to be a really physical team,” Lloyd said this week. “We are built to be a really physical team. We’ve got to keep hammering that home.”