When ESPN held its first college basketball “GameDay” at McKale on Jan. 28, 2012, it was the show.
The sports broadcasting behemoth, which had agreed to start a 12-year media rights deal with the Pac-12 in 2012-13, showed off its new conference partner, McKale Center and the 1,400 Arizona fans who showed up on an early Saturday morning.
Fans waved signs for the two-hour appearance, while Kyle Fogg and Nick Johnson came on to play a little “Know Your Roommate” game, and the GameDay hosts sampled Sonoran hot dogs.
Then, later that day, Arizona lost to Washington when Tony Wroten swatted away Josiah Turner’s last-second attempt to tie the game … and the Wildcats went on to end their season in a first-round NIT loss.
Things are different now. Arizona will host UCLA on Saturday for the first top-5 matchup in the Pac-12 in nine years, with all sorts of NCAA Tournament, Pac-12 and even NBA Draft implications on the line.
This time, “GameDay” will be about the game as much as anything.
“You don’t see this very often,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said Friday at McKale Center. “Every once in a while with a Duke-Carolina game, you’ll get a top-5, top-10 matchup but it’s not as often as you’d think. So to get 4 versus 5, and both teams come in off of wins Thursday night, it’s rare. You just don’t see it that often.
“And, look, it isn’t close. This is the game of the day, the game of the weekend. Everybody wants to see it. It’s going to be an amazing atmosphere. This is a bucket-list game. If we weren’t coming here and they asked us which one you’d want to see, this is the one I’d want to see.”
There’s a long list of reasons why it’s Arizona’s biggest home game of the year, if not biggest overall. Here are five of them:
1. The Pac-12 title. Unless Stanford upsets Oregon on Saturday afternoon at Maples Pavilion, the Wildcats won’t be able to celebrate another outright Pac-12 title by jogging MoMo Jones-style into the Zona Zoo if they beat UCLA.
That’s because even at 15-1 in conference play, the Wildcats’ margin of error is thin, since Oregon is a game behind Arizona but is expected to win its final two games (at Stanford and at Oregon State), and holds the tiebreaker with the Wildcats based on its 85-58 win over UA on Feb. 4 in Eugene.
So if the Wildcats stumble today against UCLA or next Saturday at ASU, they could be in the No. 2 slot in the Pac-12 Tournament — which means a possible matchup with UCLA in the Pac-12 Tournament semifinals instead of one against potential No. 4 seeds USC or Cal.
The UA has won three previous outright Pac-12 titles under coach Sean Miller, in 2011 (with four losses), 2014 (three losses) and 2015 (two losses).
2. NCAA Tournament implications. Lost in the hype over Saturday’s top-5 matchup is the fact that, as of now, sixth-ranked Oregon actually has the edge over Arizona and UCLA in the NCAA selection committee’s eyes for the best tournament placement out of the Pac-12.
The committee made that clear during its Feb. 11 partial bracket reveal, putting Oregon in the West Region and the UA in the Midwest, a fate that means the difference between potentially facing Gonzaga at San Jose or Kansas in Kansas City.
According to ESPN’s Jay Williams, who also spoke at McKale Center on Friday, placement in the NCAA Tournament is a big deal, along with the fact that Gonzaga could be vulnerable because it hasn’t been challenged much lately.
“As of right now, it looks like the Zags aren’t going to lose a game, so they’re probably going to get the No. 1 seed out West,” Williams said. “But who’s going to get that two seed out West? And that can make all the difference in your run.
“If I’m one of these three teams that’s in contention for the No. 2 seed in the West, I want that two seed. I want to play in my backyard. There’s a difference when you play in the NCAA Tournament and you feel like you’re playing a home game.”
Since both Oregon and Arizona have won all their games since the committee’s reveal, the order likely hasn’t changed. So far at least.
“As of right now, I have Arizona in that spot,” Williams said. “But obviously I would say this is going to be fluid movement and a lot depends on what happens here (Saturday) and in the Pac-12 Tournament. But if you’re an Arizona fan, I think you feel somewhat comfortable in that your destiny is in your hands.”
3. NBA Draft order. Draft Express projects four players in Saturday’s game will be taken in the first round of the NBA Draft: UCLA’s Lonzo Ball (2 in the 2017 draft), T.J. Leaf (23 in 2017) and Ike Anigbogu (13 in 2018) plus UA’s Lauri Markkanen (7 in 2017).
No doubt projected second-rounders such as Kobi Simmons (47 in 2017), Allonzo Trier (51 in 2017) and Rawle Alkins (42 in 2018) could be aiming to prove they’re worthy of a higher pick, too.
Trier, who opened his season when the Wildcats played at UCLA last month because of a 19-game PED suspension, is just now getting on a roll. He has made 8 of 11 3-point shots over his past two games, after making just 10 of 33 in his first eight games.
“I think every game allows me to be more comfortable,” Trier said. “When you think about it, this late in the season, you’re starting to hit your peak and play your best basketball and I’m still a little early compared to everybody else.”
The Markkanen-Leaf matchup is particularly compelling since both are big stretch fours who committed to Arizona (Leaf decommitted and Arizona landed Markkanen less than three months later).
While Leaf has played better lately than Markkanen, Williams said Markkanen’s skill set is better and that Leaf has benefited from playing with Ball.
“When you have Lonzo Ball on your team, that makes a heck of a lot of difference in how your bigs look,” Williams said. “So much of being a guard is putting your players into positions to succeed and — I’m not saying T.J. Leaf isn’t a really good player — but when you play with a guard of his caliber, he can make T.J. Leaf a potential lottery pick.”
4. It’s about … defense? While UCLA is known for having the nation’s most turbocharged offense, and the Wildcats dropped 90 points on USC Thursday, it may be worth noting that the UA beat UCLA 96-85 last month in part by holding the Bruins to just 32.3 percent 3-point shooting and outrebounding them 42-33 (collecting 12 offensive rebounds to UCLA’s 10).
The UA has the third-best defensive efficiency in Pac-12 play, and leads in 3-point field goal percentage defense in conference games (31.3). But the Wildcats have had a tendency to get beat off the dribble and have been vulnerable inside at times, no more so than on Thursday against USC — when the Trojans shot 52.9 percent overall and made 61.1 percent of their two-pointers.
“UCLA blends a lot of the characteristics of a team I think can win the national championship,” Miller said after the USC game. “For us, it has to be defense and offense but clearly our defense has to be at its best to slow them down because it’s very difficult to do that.”
What could make the rematch more difficult for the UA is that UCLA has actually been playing better defense since losing to the Wildcats and USC last month, mixing in some zone defense that UCLA coach Steve Alford says keeps his guys more engaged.
The gap now may be narrower on the defensive end.
“UCLA is more powerful on the offensive end, but they’re not the defensive team that Arizona has proven to be,” Bilas said. “That’s really the one difference in the two teams, that Arizona consistently defends at a really high level and UCLA has not done that throughout the course of the year, but they’ve done it much better over the last five or six games.”
5. It’s the best game on Arizona’s home schedule. UA season ticket holders took a beating this season, getting a home nonconference slate that included nobody but a mediocre New Mexico team and, thanks to the Pac-12’s unbalanced schedule, there wasn’t even a home game with Oregon.
That left UCLA as the best home game and, really, the only game the UA has hosted all season against a ranked opponent.
What’s more, it’s Senior Day or, in other words, Kadeem Allen Day, since he’s the Wildcats’ only senior player or manager left on the team (the team’s only senior manager, TJ Dorado, graduated in December).
So even though UCLA has avenged two of its three losses — beating USC and Oregon this month at Pauley Pavilion — Alford says it won’t be easy to make up for Arizona’s 96-85 win at Pauley last month.
“There’s confidence (from beating Oregon and USC), but when it’s ‘GameDay,’ it’s a national scene,” Alford said after UCLA beat ASU on Thursday. “Now we get ‘GameDay’ and senior night. We get the whole deal from Arizona.”
So does ESPN.
