Tonight's Arizona-UCLA game will be just like old times, but with a pandemic-era twist

LOS ANGELES — The Pac-12’s marquee basketball matchup is back, in a COVID-kind of way at least.

When No. 3 Arizona plays at No. 7 UCLA on Tuesday, the biggest Pac-12 game in Pauley Pavilion since the top-ranked Wildcats visited in 2013-14 won’t be the indoor highlight of a sunny SoCal Saturday afternoon. It won’t even be played in a traditional Pac-12 late Thursday night window.

And the ESPN “GameDay” crew won’t be anywhere in sight.

Instead, the game was crammed into a random Tuesday, after its original Dec. 30 date was postponed because of the Bruins’ COVID-19 issues. And fans weren’t even told they could show up until late last Friday.

But ESPN managed to find a slot for the matchup and dispatched its top West Coast duo, Dave Pasch and Bill Walton, to call the action. Plus, the Bruins are expected to pull in a near-capacity crowd to Pauley Pavilion, thanks possibly in part to a traffic-friendly local tip time of 8 p.m. (9 p.m. in Arizona).

Everyone just had to change plans and deal with it.

“We were flying back from the (Dec. 22) game at Tennessee thinking our next game was gonna be at UCLA, ” said UA associate head coach Jack Murphy, who scouted the Bruins. “We’ve prepared for UCLA a couple of times now … But I just think when you haven’t had a game like we all kind of did there around New Year’s, you’re just happy to be playing games.”

Especially this game.

“It’s going to be a fun one,” UCLA’s Johnny Juzang said Monday. “It’s going to be intense.”

While UCLA has been draped with hype ever since it returned nearly everyone from last season’s Final Four, then added a McDonald’s All-American (Peyton Watson) and a key transfer (Myles Johnson), the Wildcats were unranked and under just about everyone’s radar entering the season.

But Bruins coach Mick Cronin was among those who noticed that the Wildcats were in position to make last season’s NCAA Tournament if not for the school’s decision to self-impose a tournament ban, and that the core of that would-be tournament team returned to Tucson this season.

All it took was new coach Tommy Lloyd to fold those Sean Miller-recruited guys into his system, add a few helpful pieces from the transfer portal, and here we are.

No. 3 vs. No. 7. Pauley Pavilion. ESPN.

Just like old times.

“I knew last year when we were playing them that they were going to be a problem this year,” Cronin said. “You could just see they were close. They were just a little too young.

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“They were a tournament team last year. But they’ve obviously gone to a whole new level. Guys get better and obviously, Coach Lloyd’s done a tremendous job.”

But even with all that said, neither Cronin and Lloyd were making too much about this one game. Both indicated that Tuesday’s game is really just one data point in a season full of them.

“I don’t think the game will affect the outlook for either team,” Lloyd said.

UA super senior point guard Justin Kier, a newcomer to the Pac-12 but a veteran college player who spent last season in the SEC, also downplayed the significance of Tuesday’s game.

“If you look too deep into these games, that’s where you go out and try to do things that you’re not supposed to do and you kind of feel that tension,” Kier said. “We’re not going to change up anything or ask a guy to do more. We’re gonna all put it together and win together.”

Still, a win at UCLA unquestionably will boost the Wildcats’ chances of winning the Pac-12 and picking up a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed. And in the short term, it could help the Wildcats make an argument for the No. 1 spot in the Associated Press Top 25 poll, after they remained at No. 3 on Monday while Auburn leapfrogged Gonzaga into the top spot.

But things could change in the following week, when Arizona will face the Bruins again on Feb. 3 at McKale Center. Then there’s the possibility of a UA-UCLA matchup in the Pac-12 Tournament and, who knows, maybe even one deep into the NCAA Tournament.

This could be just the beginning to a series of games that will define both teams and their chances for a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed.

“You can potentially play them three more times,” Cronin said. “The thing that’s different is that they’re better than most teams. But obviously it’s great for both programs, great for the Pac-12 and hopefully great for ticket sales.”

It’s just that Cronin wished it was being showcased like big UCLA-Arizona games used to be. Because even before COVID-19 shuffled the Pac-12 schedules around this season, the Bruins and Wildcats were scheduled to play both of their regular-season games on Thursdays.

That puzzled Cronin.

“I’d like to play them on a Saturday, with ‘College GameDay’ in Westwood,” Cronin said. “If the Pac-12 would have asked me last summer — which they’re not going to, and I don’t blame them by the way (because) they shouldn’t be asking any coach — I’d have given them my opinion of how good Arizona was going to be. They got the transfers. They got everybody back and they hired a good coach.

“To me, there was no doubt that they were going to have a top team in the country. So I would have put in to have the game on a Saturday and tried to have ‘College GameDay.’ ”

Oh well. Tuesday night it is. ESPN, but no “GameDay.”

Bring your own hype, if necessary.