On new-look Senior Day, Henderson and Ramey to leave McKale as full-on Arizona Wildcats

College basketball has long had a branding problem with Senior Day, and it’s only getting worse in the transfer portal era.

Nowhere is this trend more evident than at Arizona.

Two years ago, guard Terrell Brown went through Arizona’s Senior Day ceremony after spending only the 2020-21 season with the Wildcats, collected his framed UA jersey — and then returned last season to lead the Pac-12 in scoring. For Washington.

Last season, Arizona bid a Senior Day farewell to reserve guard Justin Kier, who spent one year with the Wildcats after playing four at George Mason and another at Georgia. Three UA starters — Bennedict Mathurin, Christian Koloko and Dalen Terry — later slipped out through the backdoor, unrecognized, en route to their early NBA draft departures.

This season, it might seem weirder then ever at McKale Center: Three players who first arrived in Tucson just last summer — Cedric Henderson (from Campbell), Courtney Ramey (Texas) and Matt Lang (Gonzaga) — will go through a second Senior Day ceremony after having played a collective 11 Division I seasons elsewhere.

And the one guy who actually spent four seasons with the Wildcats, walk-on forward Jordan Mains, has a fifth year of eligibility awaiting him in which he is considering playing elsewhere.

Meanwhile, nobody really knows if this might be the last home game for standout forward Azuolas Tubelis or anyone else who could test the pros or the transfer portal.

Of course, losing top players early has been a decades-long problem for Arizona and many high-major programs. But relaxed transfer rules have led to more players finishing their careers at a second, third or even fourth college. And the NCAA’s decision to allow those playing in the COVID year of 2020-21 an extra year of eligibility has led even "seniors" to go elsewhere for a final run, as Brown did last season and Mains might do next season.

Fitting in

While UA coach Tommy Lloyd acknowledged that the classic Senior Day sendoff to a loyal four-year player is unusual now, he said there’s still a value to the kind of ceremony the Wildcats will hold before their home finale Saturday.

“I think it's always a special day, because it marks the end of an era for these guys,” Lloyd said. “Whether they get four years or five years of eligibility because of COVID, whether they played somewhere else for three years and here for two or here for one, I think it means something.

“I’m really thankful for those guys. Courtney and Ced have been tremendous additions to our program. To be honest with you, I don't know if we could have done better in the transfer portal than those two.”

Ramey and Henderson are also grad transfers, the kind that can sometimes be risky to a team’s chemistry if they bring an agenda to quickly polish their pro résumé with more shots or minutes in the remaining time they have.

The way Lloyd describes Ramey and Henderson, though, that was never an issue.

“They've been amazing fits,” Lloyd said. “They've really gotten better in how we want to play in our system over the course of the season. I'm thankful for that. I don't think there was ever any issue where they didn't want to fit the system. It was just a matter of, it takes time.”

For Henderson, that meant transitioning from a go-to role at Campbell to a sixth-man role for the first half of the season, sitting out the first four or five minutes of every game and deferring often even when he did get on the court.

That wasn’t easy. Through Arizona’s 87-68 loss at Oregon on Jan. 14, Henderson was averaging 7.0 points and 3.1 rebounds while shooting 33.3% from 3-point range.

But since Lloyd moved Henderson into the starting lineup for UA’s next game, against USC on Jan. 19, Henderson has averaged 8.8 points and 4.7 rebounds while making half of his 30 3-point shots, saying he felt more comfortable as a starter after doing so everywhere else he has been.

Eventually, Henderson found a fit.

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“That was probably the most important thing,” Henderson said. “You can't just go anywhere and just decide to play no matter how good you are. There's a lot of players that are really, really good, and there are programs that just don't fit them and they tend to play bad. They go somewhere else and have better careers. That was one of the first things I looked at."

Rapid adjustment

Ramey had a slightly different sort of process. While he launched straight into the Wildcats’ starting lineup after sitting out the first three games of the season due to an NCAA suspension, Ramey had to adjust the habits he picked up from being a four-year starter at Texas into Lloyd’s system — and from his dip into the NBA draft pool last spring.

After Cincinnati hit 17 of 34 3-pointers during Ramey's first game with the Wildcats on Nov. 21 at the Maui Invitational, Lloyd said Ramey made a “handful of mistakes” defensively while ducking under screens and doing other things that didn’t fit the Wildcats.

Since then, Ramey has become a big reason the Wildcats’ defense has steadily improved since New Year’s. According to BartTorvik.com, UA's defensive efficiency ranked just 94th before its its 69-60 win at ASU on Dec. 31 but ranks 24th from that game until now.

Offensively, Ramey's production is even more obvious. In his past 10 games, Ramey is shooting 43.2% from 3-point range and has 40 assists to just nine turnovers.

All that suggests Ramey has completed a transition from playing a relatively up-tempo game under former Texas coach Shaka Smart to a much slower pace under Chris Beard last season with the Longhorns — and then into one of the country’s fastest-paced offenses under Lloyd.

“It’s the game of basketball,” Ramey said. “You can play for a team for five years and then get traded, and you’ve got to learn new habits right away. It's just being able to adjust.

“I played with three different college coaches. They all had different schemes. I had different strength coaches, and they all had different methods. It was just something I had to adjust to. I don't think it was really that difficult.”

So even though both Ramey and Henderson both already have framed Senior Day jerseys from other schools — as does Lang, the Wildcats' walk-on transfer from Gonzaga — the new ones they’ll receive on Saturday will have some meaning, too.

Certainly they will to the guy who will help hand them over during Saturday's ceremony at McKale Center.

“I'm watching the plays they're making in these games now, and they’re Arizona basketball players,” Lloyd said of Ramey and Henderson. “I think that's really cool.”