After his Arizona Wildcats won their third game without Rawle Alkins in the past two weeks Saturday, I asked Sean Miller if maybe a screw was causing issues in his foot.
Then Miller opened up about what exactly happened with his versatile sophomore wing.
“He broke his fifth metatarsal,” Miller said. “He had a screw inserted, which is really common. There’s a ton of NBA players who have played years, almost decades, and as long as it heals properly sometimes you can make the case that it’s even stronger. But yes, there’s nothing going on with that (screw). The X-ray would have shown that. Everything that was surgically done was 100 percent done correctly and his healing process is just about over.”
Initially, Arizona had said only that Alkins had surgery on Sept. 27 to repair a foot he broke a day earlier. Because there were no specifics, it was difficult to speculate on what has grounded the sophomore wing three times in UA’s last four games.
But Miller said he wasn’t trying to hide anything and said Saturday that his surgery was “100 percent done percent correctly and his healing process is just about over.” Miller indicated Alkins would likely play Wednesday at Washington State, although probably not with the 34 minutes he played Jan. 20 at Stanford.
This was the rest of Miller's unusually detailed response about Alkins:
“He doesn’t have a fracture of any kind. We’ve given him a cat scan and MRI and an X-ray. His bone is healing. In some parts of it, it’s completely healed and in others, it’s good healing but when a player has a foot like his that’s been surgically repaired and he runs into some discomfort all of a sudden, you really just have to shut him down. And while Rawle’s being shut down, you’ve got your fingers crossed that his pain lessens and eventually goes away.
In two days on the Bay trip it went from maybe a level four or five to nothing.
“If you watch the Stanford game closely, you couldn’t even tell he was hurt and even after the game it was a little sore but it wasn’t like he was in excruciating pain. But that soreness stayed with him and, as it’s now stayed with him, we’ve called in the doctors we’ve done all this we rely on Justin (Kokoskie, UA athletic trainer) and we rely on Rawle.
“Rawle tells me right now he’s back to a zero pain, which means if you push on that area really, really hard he doesn’t feel anything. So as we start to ramp him up now, which we will, our hope is that that discomfort doesn’t come back, that it just stays away because he was pain-free for a couple of months and if that’s the case we’re gonna take a while, and maybe once in a while lessening his practice and then maybe implementing him in the game.”
“So maybe even on Wednesday, he might not play 34 minutes. He might play 20 and then we’ll see how it goes. We’re very optimistic he can stay with us for the long haul but if for some reason he gets any discomfort moving forward, we’ll do the same thing again. We’ve taken the precaution of putting him in a boot, taken the precaution of shutting him down completely. Today, he worked out (before the game) knowing that tomorrow’s off so we’ll gauge what he did.
“I look at him as he’s almost four months since surgery and that’s to his advantage. It’s up to us to be smart when he’s having some discomfort. There’s plenty of players who had that surgery who work through these patches and our goal together is to have him for the stretch-run pain free and to compromise it would be to play it. If this were in March, you could make the argument that he would have played and maybe gone through it but we’re not going to put him at any further risk and that’s how we’ll do things moving forward as well.”
Miller said Dusan Ristic told him after the game that his last 3-pointer Saturday put him over the 1,000-point mark – “which reminds you that these guys always keep their stats in their head,” Miller said with a smile – and Ristic was correct.
The 3-pointer gave him 1,001 points while two free throws 39 seconds later put him at 1,003 for his UA career.
Ristic also has 546 rebounds, an average of 4.3 over his career, which makes him just the 28th Arizona player in history in have 1,000 points and 500 rebounds.
Ristic is now also just four wins shy of tying the record of most wins played in that both Matt Muehlebach and Kaleb Tarczewski hold at 110. If the Wildcats sweep in Washington this week, and beat UCLA at home on Feb. 8, that means he could tie it in UA’s showdown with USC on Feb. 10 at McKale.
In any case, Ristic and the Wildcats are on a pace that suggests he will have already broken it by the time UA holds Senior Day on March 3 against Cal.
Ristic was funny, sincere and gracious when talking about his big game, and reaching the 1,000-point mark.
“I don’t know what to say right now," he said. "It’s an amazing feeling. When the fans went crazy, I don’t know, it’s really hard for me to say anything right now.”
He also tweeted out some appreciation:
Wow, what an incredible night! I don’t know what to say or where to begin. Thanks to all the fans that made this night unforgettable. The amazing support for the last 4 years has been unbelivable, but tonight was something else. To be continued...
— Dušan Ristić (@ristic_dusan) January 28, 2018
When asked where his extra gear is coming from lately, Ristic referred to the fact that he was playing his fifth to last home game.
“I usually talk to Parker (Jackson-Cartwright) and we talk about how this is our last chance here, our last chance to make something big here, to fill our goals, to go to the Final Four and compete for national championships.
“We don’t have a lot of games left so we just try to give 100 percent every game and now that we’re coming to the home stretch we have a little extra, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened right now. I don’t know what happened tonight. It’s really hard for me to say right now.”
As a bonus, Ristic said the 3:30 p.m. tipoff was watched live by his family back in Serbia (where it tipped off at 12:30 a.m., and was carried on Serbian national TV in addition to web streaming).
Even though UA’s win Saturday was even tighter than UA’s 94-82 win in Salt Lake City on Jan. 4, Miller appeared pretty encouraged after the game.
In UA’s seven Pac-12 wins other than its 21-point blowout win over Cal, the Wildcats have won by an average of 6.6 points.
They beat Stanford by only two points on Jan. 20 and Utah by just one Saturday.
“One thing’s for sure -- our players understand how hard it is for us to win games,” Miller said. “A lot of teams are gunning for us.
“And Utah, they’re not off the mark very far to be in the NCAA tournament. They had a shot go in and out in Salt Lake City (in a three-point loss to ASU). They just won on the road (at ASU). Both of their games against us could have gone either way, and they can really put it together down the stretch.
"Larry (Krystkowiak) is a really good coach. He puts his guys in a great position and on defense, they’re hard to play against because they’re so unique. Even when you play well on offense (against Utah), it almost feels like you didn’t because how we played is so different than from what we normally do. But I give our guys credit for finding a way.”
