Four things to know about UA basketball as you wonder if Mother Nature forgot it is mid-October in Tucson and keeps dialing up temperatures from early September:
1. So much has changed, so little has changed.
When Miles Simon was about to play his junior season at Arizona, leading to the 1997 NCAA championship, he was academically ineligible for the fall semester. It was news THIS BIG in Tucson.
Whatever he wanted to say, Lute Olson was muted. While asked frequently about Simon’s possible return, Olson would invariably say that federal “FERPA” laws prohibited him from talking about Simon. Olson would often apply the FERPA rules — which protect the privacy of a student’s educational records — to any player eligibility situation, even when it didn’t apply.
Now it’s Sean Miller’s turn. He is unable to speak publicly about whether sophomore forward Allonzo Trier is eligible to play in the regular season. UA athletic director Greg Byrne also declined to speak about Trier on Friday night. Obviously, something’s up.
College athletes are now protected from prying eyes to the point of being in the Witness Protection Program. Access and insight is limited because of a proliferation of untrained website “media” people.
A year ago, it was Elliott Pitts. This year Allonzo Trier. If there is any good to this entanglement, it’s that Trier plays on the wing, the most replaceable position in college basketball.
2. Miller refers to the Red-Blue Game as one of the most important weekends of the basketball season. It’s a celebration of UA basketball. Friday’s event was about as good as it gets in college basketball.
What Miller meant is that 7-foot 1-inch DeAndre Ayton sat in the front row across from the UA bench Friday night. Ayton signed autographs, posed for pictures and seemed to handle his celebrity well. He is the nation’s No. 1 recruit in the class of 2017. He sat near a collection of future McDonald’s All-Americans that, collectively could probably get to the Final Four a year from now.
Arizona’s reach is head-shaking. Sitting next to Ayton was 6-5 Lonnie Walker of Reading, Pa., a class of 2017 shooting guard who is defending national champion Villanova’s top recruiting target. And he was just another face in the crowd.
If you want to see Ayton, he will be at Pima College Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., when his team, Hillcrest Prep of Phoenix, plays Brian Peabody’s Aztecs in an exhibition game.
3. Pac-12 Network analyst Don MacLean, the league’s career scoring leader, watched Arizona practice last week and quickly deduced that 7-foot freshman Lauri Markkanen is a likely lottery pick.
Markkanen effortlessly scored 14 points Friday. It wasn’t just the numbers in the box score.
“That’s to be expected of him,” said Miller. It was Markkanen’s fluid shooting stroke, his range to 20 feet, his delicate touch with both hands, his court presence. He’ll have to fold his game into Miller’s team-first demand, and that might take a while, but he’ll be a first-team all-conference player barring injury.
4. The Arizona Republic reported that “hundreds” of people turned out Friday night for ASU’s version of the Red-Blue Game at festive Mill Avenue. It was called “Mill Madness” for the Sun Devils’ men’s and women’s basketball programs. By comparison, Miller referred to Arizona’s Red-Blue Game as “sacred.”