On freshman mistakes and life at .500 after Arizona Wildcats lose at UCLA

LOS ANGELES – During a somewhat subdued Zoom postgame interview after UCLA beat his team for the fifth straight time Thursday, UA coach Sean Miller said the Bruins wore down the Wildcats as the game went on.

But was it physically, or mentally? While UCLA probably couldn't afford to lose Thursday if it wanted to stay in the Pac-12 hunt, Arizona may have only three games left to play, has no hope of a Pac-12 championship, no hope of a postseason, just the hope of maybe finishing above .500 in league competition.

So how do they keep going?

“That is the challenge,” Miller said. “Is that a challenge for me or our staff? Absolutely. The last three years we’ve played .500 basketball (in the Pac-12). A year ago around this time, we were still playing for the Pac-12 championship. We clearly were a tournament team but at the end of the day we were 10-8.

“Now we’re, what, 8-8? That’s kind of where we’ve been. We have to fix that and this is the path we’re on towards doing that.”

The player UA made available for postgame comment, Jordan Brown, said it was "about the next game and finishing strong."

Except… next up in the way of that path is first-place USC, which dispatched ASU 89-71 on Wednesday at the Galen Center to improve to 18-3.

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“They have a different makeup on their team (than UCLA) but they’re our conference’s best team and they’re playing for a Pac-12 championship,” Miller said. “We have to play a great game. If we had played a great game tonight we might not have won but we would have been right there.”

After going 1 for 5 from the field on Thursday, Dalen Terry is now 2 for 11 overall from the field and 0 for 4 from 3 over his past five games.

When asked if Terry is facing a freshman wall or something else, Miller said:

“You know, Dalen’s strengths right now are a lot of other things,” Miller said. “Scoring will come. As you get deeper into conference play and scouting becomes even more relevant, teams are well-defined and playing hard, it’s clearly a freshman sometimes has those moments. And a number of our freshmen didn’t play well tonight.”

While Azuolas Tubelis had 18 points, eight rebounds and two blocks, he also had four turnovers. Bennedict Mathurin also had four turnovers to go with 0 for 3 shooting, though he did have four rebounds and three assists.

Kerr Kriisa shot 1 for 3 but had four turnovers and had some trouble guarding Tyger Campbell at times.

“Benn obviously had a very tough night,” Miller said. “Kerr had a couple of turnovers that really aren’t characteristic of him.”