Wildcats will be tested by three games in three days at Maui Invitational

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Even though Tommy Lloyd has coached in five previous Maui Invitationals as a Gonzaga assistant, he found Sunday that things are a little different for the head guy.

For one, there were the obligatory coaches-and-surfboards photos, with the Arizona coach finding himself sandwiched between San Diego State’s Brian Dutcher and Louisville’s Kenny Payne, all of them fronting palm trees, the Pacific Ocean and, in the distance, the island of Lanai.

Also, Lloyd had to sit on the pre-tournament interview podium with ESPN’s Dan Shulman and seven other Aloha-shirt-clad coaches who often appeared to flash intensity behind their sponsor-provided sunglasses.

Lloyd handled that one characteristically.

“I think we’re gonna come in here and really try to slow it down,” Lloyd said jokingly, when Shulman suggested the Wildcats would get up and down quickly Monday their first-round game with Cincinnati. “And see if we can get these games in the 50s.”

Then, after leaving the podium, Lloyd had to learn the rules of the Maui coaches’ traditional charity free-throw contest. Each coach fired up three free throws toward a rickety basket inside the atrium of the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort, with only Cincinnati’s Wes Miller and Creighton’s Greg McDermott making all of theirs.

Lloyd banked in his first shot. Sent the second one through the net. Bounced the third off the front of the rim.

Then nearly set up for another before he was politely stopped by officials.

“He wants to keep shooting,” the announcer noted.

That’s not a surprise. As much as Lloyd takes a self-deprecating approach toward his own basketball skills, he did once set the Walla Walla Community College single-game scoring record with 52 points before going on to play for Division III Whitman College.

A streak of competitiveness might still, occasionally, seep into his game even though he says he did not practice for Sunday’s contest.

“It’s hard to practice when you don’t know how high the hoop’s gonna be or how big the ball’s gonna be,” Lloyd said, chuckling. “Whatever. It was fine. I just relaxed on my third one. The first two were easy.”

The next adjustments Lloyd has to make will be a blur. After running the Wildcats through a practice Sunday afternoon at the Lahaina Civic Center, Lloyd will have to steer the Wildcats through three highly competitive games in three days.

As Lloyd noted, the only other time college basketball teams face that sort of gauntlet is during their conference tournaments; Pac-12 teams can play up to four games in four days in their Las Vegas-based event.

But the Maui Invitational treadmill comes just two weeks into the season, when all teams are in the early stages of developing their chemistry, rotation and strengths.

That applies even to No. 9 Arkansas, the highest ranked team in the Maui Invitational field.

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“We’re still trying to figure out our identity and who, exactly, we are on both sides of the floor,” Razorbacks coach Eric Musselman said.

San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher, whose Aztecs will face No. 14 Arizona on Tuesday if both teams win or both teams lose Monday, has been through the Maui adjustments before both as an assistant and head coach.

Dutcher was an assistant coach to Steve Fisher when Arizona beat SDSU in the 2014-15 Maui Invitational championship game and a head coach in 2018-19 when the Aztecs went 1-2 and did not play Arizona.

In both roles, Dutcher learned to be flexible.

“There is no routine because you get here and you’ve got 20 minutes to warm up sometimes so you’ve got to shorten your warm up,” Dutcher said. “Then the locker rooms is a curtain. So nothing really prepares you for getting ready for the game.

“It’s a conference tournament feel: You have either eight hours or 12 hours to get ready for the next game. So you have to have a team that can go in the film room and do a walkthrough and be ready to play the next day. That’s always a challenge.”

It helps, Dutcher said, that San Diego State historically has had played well for consecutive days in the Mountain West tournament, reaching its conference tournament final five straight seasons.

Lloyd has also done the same both an assistant and as as head coach.

In every single year as a Gonzaga assistant coach, he helped the Zags reach the West Coast Conference tournament final, while as a rookie head coach last season, he led UA to the Pac-12 Tournament championship.

Lloyd, who later picked up several national coach of the year honors, even had to pivot after point guard Kerr Kriisa went down with an ankle injury in the quarterfinals.

This time, Lloyd will actually be adding a key player back into the mix, with combo guard Courtney Ramey scheduled to make his UA debut after missing the first three games of the regular season because of an NCAA suspension.

But over the next three days, Lloyd’s rotation could face subtractions, whether because of fatigue, injury, or foul trouble.

It’ll be his job to figure it out.

“In this situation, you just deal with it day-by-day,” Lloyd said. “There’s gonna be a lot of things that play out over the course of three days that you maybe haven’t experienced this year. So I think coming in with a master plan is probably a dangerous thing because there’s going to be so many things that do go wrong. You want to be adaptable and do things as they come.”

“Hopefully your guys come out and are able to play when things are changing and playing out right in front of them.”