Game info

Who: No. 13 seed Buffalo (26-8) vs. No. 4 seed Arizona (27-7)

What: NCAA South Region first round

Where: Taco Bell Arena, Boise, Idaho

When: 6:40 p.m.

Watch: CBS

Listen: 1290-AM, 107.5-FM

Follow: @TheWildcaster on Twitter / TheWildcaster on Facebook

Probable starters: Arizona

Probable starters: Buffalo

How they match up

How they got here

Buffalo beat Toledo 76-66 Saturday in the championship game of the Mid-American Conference Tournament to capture an automatic NCAA Tournament bid. The Bulls also won the MAC regular-season title with a record of 15-3, losing only road games at Kent State, Northern Illinois and Miami of Ohio.

Series history

The Wildcats have never met Buffalo, a Division I member since 1991. They are 5-4 against teams from the Mid-American Conference, and 0-1 against MAC teams in the NCAA Tournament (a 71-62 loss to Miami of Ohio in 1995).

Buffalo overview

The Bulls added a top-shelf juco transfer (forward Jeremy Harris) and a former Missouri standout (guard Wes Clark) to a team that won 17 games last season. They now run a fast-paced, aggressive offensive attack that primarily uses four perimeter players, three of whom hit 3-pointers at a 39 percent rate or better.

Harris, a left-handed and athletic stretch four who was the No. 2-rated junior college player last season, is the 97th most accurate 3-point shooter in the country (43.3 percent). Their perimeter attack features two ball handlers with 2.3-1 assist-turnover ratios who can get in the lane and create: Clark and Davonta Jordan. Clark is also a scoring threat on the drive or when pulling up. Small forward CJ Massinburg is the Bulls’ leading scorer, taking nearly half of his shots from beyond the 3-point line and dishing an average of 2.5 assists per game. Inside the Bulls rely on 6-8, 250-pound Nick Perkins.

Key player: CJ Massinburg

The first-team all-MAC pick isn’t just the Bulls’ leading scorer. He’s also their top rebounder and is third in assists, with his unselfish personality and playing style setting the tone for a team known for good chemistry.

Key player: Deandre Ayton

Just as the spotlight on UA’s star freshman continues to brighten, with him being seriously mentioned for national player of the year honors, Ayton will have to guard some mobile forwards and assert himself inside while experiencing the pressure of the NCAA Tournament for the first time.

Fresh start

Never dismissed FYI

— Wes Clark (@Im_back_15) February 16, 2016

Buffalo guard Wes Clark appeared in McKale Center two seasons ago, but you’ll have to forgive him if he doesn’t remember much about it.

“It was a big, fast game,” he said. “Too fast for me at that time.”

Clark was right about that: He made 4 of 5 shots while playing for Missouri in the Tigers’ 88-52 loss to the Wildcats in December 2015 – but fouled out after just 15 minutes played.

Then again, you can hardly blame him if he doesn’t want to remember much about playing for the then-woeful Tigers at all. The school said Clark was dismissed two months later for “failing to meet the academic expectations of the Mizzou athletic department,” to which Clark issued a rebuttal on Twitter.

“Never dismissed FYI,” Clark tweeted.

During Buffalo’s open locker room session Wednesday, Clark said his departure was a “misunderstanding,” and that he’s better off now at Buffalo.

“In a lot of ways,” he said. At Missouri “I didn’t see it as being in school. I just thought I was a basketball player. I take school more seriously. There were a lot of growing pains I went through. Now I’m a better father. I make better decisions.”

It helped that Clark returned to play for his former coach at Michigan’s Romulus High School, Nate Oats, who left Romulus to coach under Bobby Hurley at Buffalo. Oats took over the Buffalo job when Hurley left for ASU in 2015.

“He obviously had some stuff going at Missouri,” Oats said of Clark. “I knew him well enough and trusted him well enough. And he’s been unbelievably great since walking on the campus.”

A little help

Oats said he watched both UA-ASU games during the regular season, and that he spoke with Hurley a few times this week about the Wildcats, though he realized that scouting well isn’t all that’s needed against Arizona. ASU lost both games, after all.

“I do think that Bobby was on to some things when they played them,” Oats said. The Sun Devils “play similar to us. I read somewhere Sean Miller talked about us kind of playing like them. So they kind of know we’re going to spread it like Arizona State did, but it was successful for Arizona State at stretches in the game. We have to do a better job than they did at some of the things they didn’t do so well on.”

Things like trying to figure out how to slow down Deandre Ayton.

“Everybody in the Pac-12 hasn’t figured it out,” Oats said. “I’ve got a few friends that coach there, I’ve talked to them. He’s definitely the No. 1 pick in the draft from what everybody is saying. You can see it when you watch film. He’s 7-1, 260 and moves like a guard.

“It’s not going to be that easy. I think you have to limit his touches as much as possible. There’s some pretty good bigs in our league, but we’ve just told our guys, If he gets it, you’re going to just have to guard him. That’s not going to work with him. You’re going to have to double, and pick your poison on who and where you double on. You’ve got to play hard.”

Oats also noted that UA also has others to deal with, too. “There’s no secrets here. Deandre Ayton is a force to deal with, but they’ve got Trier,” he said. “He’s a pro, too. Rawle Alkins is a pro. Ristic might be a pro. They’ve got two 7-footers, you’re not dealing with just one.”

Hardcore

A native of North Carolina who played juco ball in Florida last season, Buffalo forward Jeremy Harris quickly picked up a new perspective from his new hometown.

“The snow kind of threw me off a little bit,” Harris said. “Before our first home game, we had a couple of feet of snow. I asked ‘Are we still gonna play today?’ And everybody looked at me like I was crazy.”

Pregame nutrition

During his assigned press conference to speak about his team’s matchup with Davidson, Kentucky coach John Calipari spoke about almost anything but that.

Not that Calipari was disrespectful about those Wildcats: He made it clear that there’s no guarantee Arizona and Kentucky meet Saturday in part because of what Davidson can do.

But Calipari talked about how he doesn’t have a problem with one-and-dones or if players become able to jump directly to the NBA out of high school. He talked about visiting Evel Knievel’s launch pad across the Snake River, about once driving across the Idaho border to Jackpot, Nevada … and he talked about donuts.

That is, once he could get past the fact that Boise’s D.K. Donuts opens at 4 a.m.

“Who goes at 4 a.m.?” Calipari asked. “Policemen? Ranchers? Farmers? Unless you’re just getting in, and (Boise) doesn’t look like a town like that.”

Calipari claims he is “not a donut eater” but admitted to trying a bacon maple donut.

“It was unbelievable,” Calipari said. “I looked at them and said ‘Oh, my gosh.’ So we did the bacon. And I cut it four ways. I only had a little bit… and then I did the bowtie that had the chocolate and maple together dripping off it. Is anybody getting hungry right now? There was so much sugar that I won’t sleep tonight. And then I did the apple fritter.”

Numbers game

0

Arizona losses in four NCAA Tournament games at Boise (the first two rounds in 1989 and 2005).

2

Previous Buffalo appearances in the NCAA Tournament, both losses

63.2

Points averaged by the last five Arizona opponents (after UA gave up an average of 72.6 before that).

84.8

Average points Buffalo has scored this season, the seventh-highest average in the country.