I was caught by surprise last week when Sean Miller dropped a basketball bomb on those who suspected his sixth Arizona basketball team would proceed directly to the Final Four without any intermediate stops.
“I can see us getting off to a rocky start,” Miller said.
He articulated his team’s depth issues. “We’ll play five or six guys at this point,” he said. “The depth isn’t there.”
Had I been eating popcorn, I would’ve needed someone to perform an emergency Heimlich maneuver.
Miller spoke about “an identity crisis on defense.”
A day earlier, Arizona debuted on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s college basketball issue. The chorus of those heralding Arizona as a possible national champion hadn’t subsided for months.
And then came Miller’s bomb.
Whether this is a motivational ploy by a coach trying to squeeze 10 or 11 pieces into six or seven holes, or whether Miller genuinely suspects that replacing Nick Johnson and Aaron Gordon is a process the average UA basketball fan doesn’t understand or appreciate, will play out over the next four months.
There’s no rush in college basketball.
But there is precedence for what Miller said last week.
After Arizona lost Sean Elliott and Anthony Cook, two first-round NBA draft picks, off a 1988-89 team periodically ranked No. 1, Lute Olson warned that the future could be “rocky.” It’s the same term Miller uses now.
I don’t think many believed Olson 25 years ago.
Six-foot-11-inch transfer Brian Williams was, at the time, the most touted new player in UA history. Future NBA players Jud Buechler and Sean Rooks gave Arizona the most imposing front line in the game. Veteran guards Matt Muehlebach and Matt Othick were back.
But when Arizona opened the Pac-10 season with a rare set of pre-Christmas games, it lost 68-63 at Oregon and routed 84-61 at Oregon State.
Replacing Elliott and Cook was a lot like Arizona now replacing Gordon and Johnson. It took time. But by March, Arizona swept the Pac-10 tournament, winning by margins of 23, 24 and 16 points, and went 24-5 after the trip to Oregon.
As with Arizona’s difficulties on the Oregon trail in 1989-90, discovering it would get nothing less than its opponent’s “A” game, the same is true today. The target grows.
On Thursday night, after Utah’s impressive exhibition game debut against Division III Pacific University, Utes coach Larry Krystkowiak let it be known that his team, picked to finish No. 2 in the Pac-12,is working every angle to catch the Wildcats.
Envisioning the Feb. 28 Salt Lake City showdown against Arizona on ESPN, Krystkowiak said he had met with the Utah pep band in attempt to make the Huntsman Center more intimidating.
Coach K requested that the band use more bass and more drums, more noise, more everything at a school that recently remade the Huntsman Center the way Arizona reworked McKale Center.
Sean Miller’s team is going to get the Big Drum treatment wherever it goes this year. No wonder he has sounded an alarm.
