EUGENE, Ore. — Even though he was given less than 42 hours to prepare for the biggest game of his team’s season, Arizona coach Sean Miller still joked around a bit and appeared in a pretty good mood Friday.
And why not? One aspect of his pregame prep was already taken care of.
That is, he doesn’t have to worry about getting the Wildcats up for this one.
Consider:
- Arizona’s game against Oregon will be played at Matthew Knight Arena, before a sold-out crowd and Saturday afternoon ESPN audience, giving the winner a chance to earn some Final Four-caliber cred in front of an East Coast audience that will actually be awake this time.
- Oregon, which snapped Arizona’s 49-game homecourt winning streak last season, is hanging on to a 39-game homecourt streak of its own. The Ducks’ last home loss came in January 2015, when T.J. McConnell rattled off 21 points to help UA win 80-62.
- Oregon beat UA in a wild Pac-12 Tournament semifinal game last season, which might have resulted in the Wildcats’ unfriendly NCAA Tournament placement. Arizona traveled to Rhode Island for a game it eventually lost to Wichita State.
- The winner will take the inside track for the Pac-12 title — and the conference’s best NCAA tournament seed, since their résumés to date are similar.
- There will be no rematch, at least in the regular season. The Pac-12’s unbalanced schedule doesn’t allow UA and Oregon to play more than once last season or this season, when both were among the conference’s top teams.
With all of that, Miller figures he has little to say.
“I think the thing you learn over time is you don’t have to remind them of the obvious,” Miller said. “They know more than anybody that all eyes are on this game. Anybody who’s talking to them, that’s what they’re talking about and also I think players know when they’re in a game filled with other really good players.
“From that perspective, there’s nobody in our group who doesn’t have respect for Oregon. We all know the task.”
Even through the always-careful words of UA players, you can see that’s probably the case.
Parker Jackson-Cartwright said after UA beat OSU on Thursday that Saturday’s game is “no bigger, no smaller” than any other, but did call the Ducks a “great team.”
So, yeah, maybe it’s big. Guard Allonzo Trier acknowledged that.
“We respect Oregon a lot. We know what they’re capable of,” Trier said. “We know the kind of season they’ve had last year and this year, so we’re excited to go meet them. It’s a tough game but we’ll be ready for it.”
It can be difficult to tell what the players involved are thinking sometimes, but actions speak volumes. Take Thursday’s games, when a case could be made that both UA and Oregon were looking ahead to the Saturday showdown.
The Wildcats struggled early with Oregon State’s zone defense and let the Beavers shoot 50 percent before halftime.
The Ducks took things to an even bigger extreme. They barely survived against Arizona State at home, needing another Dillon Brooks takeover to escape with their 39th straight home win, 71-70.
Miller said he didn’t think the Wildcats were guilty of looking ahead as much as just failing to take advantage of early offensive opportunities.
As far as Oregon, Miller said the Sun Devils had the kind of lineup that can cause the Ducks trouble. ASU shot 55 percent from the field in the second half Thursday and made nine of their 27 attempts from beyond the arc.
“ASU did a great job,” Miller said. “I think because of the way they play — they’re small and really skilled — they matched up really well with Oregon.
“Sometimes, Oregon does that to the other team where they put Dillon Brooks at the four and they’re really hard to deal with on offense. It was almost kind of like two teams trying to do the same thing and the guards from Arizona State played a very, very good game.”
Maybe the guards from Arizona will do the same thing Saturday.
Trier is nearly back in form after four games back, save for his 1-for-4 3-point performance. Jackson-Cartwright is shooting better than he has since returning from his high ankle sprain on Dec. 30.
But Miller says he expects Brooks will play between 20-25 minutes at the power forward, as he usually does, which means the Oregon star may be matched up against a 7-footer named Lauri Markkanen.
That may be good for UA offensively, but dangerous defensively.
Markkanen’s defense has improved this season. But guarding the athletic 6-foot-7-inch combo forward presents both a challenge and a threat to foul trouble that the Wildcats may not want to take on very often.
“It’s inevitable,” Miller said. “There’s going to be a portion of the game that he’s going to be on (Brooks) and I think a big part of the game will be how that works. … Lauri’s too vital of a player for us to deviate from what makes him good.”
But if Brooks takes over again, and the Ducks pull out a third straight win over Arizona on Saturday, it still might not mean everything. A win gives Oregon the Pac-12 tiebreaker, but that’s only if the standings remain the same throughout the final four weeks of conference play.
And, Miller indicated, who’s to say that will happen?
“We are over halfway but there’s still so many games left,” Miller said. “For example, Oregon at home the other night (against ASU). You would have thought they’d be OK there, but guess what? They almost lost that, and ditto for us against Washington.
“We just have to finish this thing out and we’re a long way from that.”
