Struggling Oregon State Beavers still dangerous for Pac-12-leading Arizona Wildcats

Despite making their first NCAA Tournament in 26 years last March, the Oregon State Beavers haven’t won any of their nine Pac-12 games so far this season.

Their heart-and-soul from last season, Gary Payton II, is off filling box scores in the NBA D-League. Veteran guard Malcolm Duvivier quit the team in the preseason for personal reasons.

And nobody can figure out how to get leading scorers Tres Tinkle and Stephen Thompson Jr. healthy at the same time.

“I didn’t think we would drop off as much as we did,” OSU forward Drew Eubanks said this week. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t easy.”

Yet the Beavers still have one reason for hope when first-place Arizona visits Gill Coliseum on Thursday.

That would be history.

During Sean Miller’s seven-plus seasons at the UA, the Wildcats have made five trips to Oregon (they skipped it in 2011-12 and last season because of the Pac-12’s unbalanced schedule).

On those five trips, they are 3-2 at Oregon … and 2-3 at Oregon State, including a 2014-15 loss that arguably kept the Wildcats from a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed.

So who says Saturday’s showdown between Arizona and Oregon is the Wildcats’ only big game of the week?

“I don’t think we have a player on our roster that’s ever won at Oregon State,” Miller said. “For us it’s a challenge to go in there and play well. … Gill Coliseum has been a tough place for us. We haven’t had great success there.”

He’s right. Only juniors Parker Jackson-Cartwright and Dusan Ristic have ever played at Gill, in 2014-15, and neither scored a point in limited roles off the bench during UA’s 58-56 loss.

What’s more, that game just might have kept the Wildcats out of the Final Four that season.

The UA had a shot at a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed in 2014-15 with only three regular-season losses — but one of them was against the then-lowly Beavers, possibly hurting the UA’s résumé the most.

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When that résumé resulted in the UA getting only the West’s No. 2 seed, during a year when both Kentucky and Wisconsin warranted No. 1s, guess what? The Badgers were shipped out as the West’s No. 1 seed … which gave them the chance to defeat the Wildcats for the second straight year in the Elite Eight.

Miller also lost at Oregon State during his first year of 2009-10 and even with the Derrick Williams-MoMo Jones Elite Eight team of 2010-11, when the Wildcats spent two full days over New Year’s waiting for the game while staying across the street from OSU’s Reser Stadium.

Going back to the Lute Olson era, there were plenty of Gill horrors for the Wildcats, too: The defending national champs needed a Miles Simon coast-to-coast buzzer-beater to win by a point in 1998, the then-No. 3-ranked Wildcats lost to Deaundra Tanner’s buzzer-beater in 2000, while former UA assistant Jay John beat the Wildcats as OSU’s head coach in 2004 and 2006.

This year, the Beavers will throw out multiple zone defenses that could cause the Wildcats at least some initial trouble, if their 77-66 win over Washington was any indication last Saturday.

And despite their winless record in conference play, the Beavers have shown signs of life. They trailed UCLA by only a point midway through the second half of a Dec. 30 game at Gill before losing by 13, and just last weekend lost at Colorado and Utah by only single digits.

They still believe, even now.

“It’s kind of hard because we have a young team but we’re very resilient and we never give up,” Eubanks said. “The Utah game was evidence of that. We have a lot of great people on this team.”

The Beavers also still have some fans believing in them, too. They’re averaging 4,926 fans over four Pac-12 home games so far, with more likely Thursday.

Moreover, the Wildcats’ 9-0 conference start and vault into the Top 5 makes them a bigger target than ever this season.

It will be pretty much just the Wildcats and their wary-eyed coach against a bunch of orange.

“It’s a conference game, a home game for them, and when you’re a team like them you’re looking for those highlights,” Miller said. “Certainly with us coming in undefeated, it would be a big boost for them in their season and really in their future if they could beat us.

“That’s part of being the hunted and we have to be able to back that up, with great togetherness, being ready and executing and understanding it’s really not about who we’re playing — it’s about us.”