Could UCLA play one more time at McKale Center? Pac-12 is pondering the possibility

LAS VEGAS — Changing next season's Pac-12 schedule to force UCLA through McKale Center one more time isn’t a problem with the conference, Arizona fans or television partners. They appear to be all for it.

The issue is getting another Pac-12 athletic director to give up a desirable home game with the Bruins, who are scheduled as of now to skip Tucson on their final pass through the conference in 2023-24.

“I think ESPN would definitely want it. Fox would definitely want it,” said Pac-12 deputy commissioner Jamie Zaninovich, who oversees men’s basketball in the conference. “It’s a matter of working it through the membership. The ADs are going to have to decide if it’s valuable enough to have that.”

Now playing a 20-game schedule, the Pac-12 began a 10-year rotation last season that ensured all teams would play the same amount of times at the same sites between 2021-22 and 2030-31. (Each team plays eight teams twice, always including its geographic rival, and four teams once per season.)

Next season, UCLA has been scheduled to only play ASU and Cal away from home, and only UA and Washington State at home.

But since the Bruins and Trojans are leaving for the Big Ten in 2023-24, the 10-year schedule won’t get to balance out anyway. That has opened a chance for the league to experiment next season before it shores up a new schedule plan with whatever teams it has in 2024-25 — with whatever new media-rights deal it strikes.

In an interview with the Star during the Pac-12 Tournament, Zaninovich said adding back a UCLA game at McKale next season is a possibility, while the league also could break up the travel-partner format on some weekends so as to allow games to be played earlier in the week.

Without trying, the Pac-12 actually found the concept worked out pretty well already. During the COVID-altered seasons of 2020-21 and 2021-22, the Pac-12 rescheduled many makeup games on Mondays and Tuesdays, receiving some positive feedback from media partners and some around the conference.

That included UA coach Tommy Lloyd, despite the fact that the Wildcats were forced to make a three-game road trip in January 2022 that ended with a Tuesday-night loss at UCLA.

“Tommy’s actually been an advocate for this,” Zaninovich said. “It was a nice drumbeat of Pac 12 basketball relevance because we weren't so loaded up on Thursday and Saturday.”

Zaninovich said the Pac-12 typically plays over 60% of its conference games on Thursday and Saturday, while no other conference plays more than 40% on any two days — something he said the television partners aren’t wild about.

“They’d rather have the games spread out a little bit more," he said.

But the Thursday-Saturday pattern is largely due to the Pac-12’s travel-partner tradition, in which teams aim to save time and money by playing two nearby games within two or three days, while its geographic rival plays the same teams in the opposite order.

Because the conference is so spread out, Zaninovich said the Pac-12 is not discussing getting rid of the travel-partner tradition but possibly breaking apart the closer pairs.

“I don't think we would ever split up the Arizonas going to Washington,” Zaninovich said. “But we could split up the Washingtons and Oregons, or the Oregon and the Northern California schools, in a way that gives us more flexibility to schedule games more days of the week.”

In addition, because the 2023-24 season is essentially pushed back a week, with the Final Four not being held until April 6-8, Zaninovich said Pac-12 coaches have also discussed moving each team's two early December conference games into the post-Christmas/New Year’s week, giving Pac-12 teams a straight 11 weeks of conference games.

Zaninovich said discussions are just starting over all the experimental possibilities, which won’t be formally moved on until league meetings in May. The week-to-week schedule is usually finalized in June, with television partners divvying up the exact dates and times in late summer.

“Everything we're talking about here is just a one-year thing because we don’t know after ’24 who will be in the conference," Zaninovich said. “There’s just a lot of uncertainty in that (new) media deal. There's a lot of stuff we can't really do until we know that. What we're talking about here is stuff that we're like, `Hey, we don't want to wait.’ "

Tubelis named Naismith semifinalist

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Arizona forward Azuolas Tubelis was named one of 10 finalists for the Naismith Trophy, one of the major national player-of-the-year awards in college basketball.

UCLA's Jaime Jaquez and POY favorite Zach Edey of Purdue were also named to the list, along with Indiana’s Trayce Jackson-Davis, Kansas State’s Keyontae Johnson, Marquette’s Tyler Kolek, Alabama’s Brandon Miller, Houston’s Marcus Sasser, Gonzaga’s Drew Timme and Kansas’ Jalen Wilson.

The Naismith Trophy is scheduled to announce four finalists on March 21, and the winner will be named on April 2 during the Final Four.

UA center Oumar Ballo, meanwhile, did not make the five-player list of finalists for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award, the Basketball Hall of Fame's award for the top center in college basketball.

Edey is also expected to win that award. The others named included Creighton's Ryan Kalkbrenner, Kentucky's Oscar Tshiebwe, North Carolina's Armando Bacot and UConn's Adama Sanogo.

Buzz killer

Since hitting his 60-foot buzzer bomb to give ASU an 89-88 win over UA on Feb. 25 at McKale Center, Sun Devil guard Desmond Cambridge hasn’t found the moment easy to escape.

Not only was Cambridge scheduled to face the same Wildcats again in Friday’s Pac-12 semifinals, but he also had to listen to everyone else relive the moment over the past two weeks.

“It was just way too much,” Cambridge said. “Way too much. People you haven't talked to for four or five years come out of the woodwork. So that's why you keep that circle tight.”

Ultimately, Cambridge found the best way to cut it off was to delete the Twitter and Instagram apps off his phone temporarily while keeping his accounts alive for when things return to normal.

“My phone was glitching at one point,” Cambridge said. “After that shot, so many people, just random, everyone in class and in Tempe (were in contact). That's why I tried to put myself in a little shell, try not to talk to anyone and just stay in my own lane because I knew we had plenty more things to do.”

Hopkins praises mentor

Once Syracuse’s designated coach-in-waiting, Mike Hopkins left instead to take over Washington before the 2017-18 season.

As it turned out, that decision made him a head coach six years before he would have been one at Syracuse. Longtime Orange coach Jim Boeheim is leaving this spring after a 47-year stint as head coach — and another seven years before that as an assistant coach.

“To be over 50 years at one university is pretty special,” Hopkins said when told of Hopkins’ departure after Washington's first-round loss to Colorado. “He's given his heart and soul to that school. Still surprised they don't have a statue made of him in the middle of campus.

“When you think of Syracuse University, you think of Jim Boeheim and you think of the Carrier Dome, and now both of those will be gone, which is very sad. But one of the greats. One of the greats.”

Boeheim leaves with 1,015 official wins, though he won 101 more before the NCAA vacated them for rules violations within the Syracuse program. He is second only to Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, who finished with 1,202.