Of Arizona’s first nine possessions Thursday, three resulted in turnovers and five ended with missed shots.
By halftime, the Wildcats could manage only 21 points, by far their lowest-first half output of the season.
It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t get much better offensively for the Wildcats the rest of the night at McKale Center. Arizona beat Oregon State and its matchup zone defense 62-53 on Thursday but, save an acrobatic pair of back-to-back second-half dunks the gave them their first lead of the game, this one was mostly about defense.
Which, in a way, could have made the Wildcats’ win one of their most important of the season – especially to their defensive-minded coach.
Everyone knows how loaded Arizona is offensively, with Deandre Ayton posting his 12th double-double of the season, Allonzo Trier efficiently picking up 21 points and Rawle Alkins throwing down a crowd-pleasing reverse slam and nine other points.
But what’s been less certain – and particularly upsetting for coach Sean Miller – has been their defense. Entering the week, after an 80-77 loss at Colorado on Saturday, UA was hovering with a defensive efficiency that ranked in the 70s among Division I teams.
On Thursday, in a defensive slugfest, the Wildcats held Oregon State to 39.3 percent shooting and helped force 15 turnovers, collecting nine steals and blocking four shots.
“Any good defensive team scores a lot more points than you realize because of their defense,” Miller said. “It’s not always going to be a steal-and-dunk, but it’s gonna be a missed shot and on missed shots, it’s harder for the defense to get back. When we have that going for us, consecutive stops, a team really working together, even if their offense had the ball for a while, it’s going to be better for our offense.”
Arizona’s offense managed to produce 44.8 percent shooting in the second half, when it added only three turnovers to the nine it committed before halftime, although the Wildcats shot only 28.6 percent from 3-point range.
Trailing for the first 23 minutes of the game, Arizona broke it open midway in the second half, when Ayton played 18 minutes after sitting out nine minutes in the first half with foul trouble. Ayton still finished with 14 points and 10 rebounds while the Wildcats moved to 13-4 overall and 3-1 in the Pac-12. OSU dropped to 10-6 and 2-2.
Trier collected his 21 on 6-for-12 field-goal shooting and 5 of 6 from the free-throw line, while Ayton’s double-double tied the UA freshman record for most double-doubles with 12. Ayton is on pace to break UA’s all-time record of 22 double-doubles, set by Al Fleming in 1974-75.
Alkins had 11 points on 4-for-9 shooting and no complaints about the slow pace or nature of the game.
“The best offense is good defense,” Alkins said. “So defense or offense we have a lot of great plays.”
Alkins had one of the best plays of the season after UA took its first lead by converting a turnover to a dunk.
With Oregon State leading 26-25, strong UA defense on the perimeter forced OSU’s Stephen Thompson Jr. to throw an errant ball into the post that Ayton easily picked off. That led to a fast-break dunk from Trier on a feed from Parker Jackson-Cartwright.
Then Alkins nearly brought McKale Center down with the next dunk. Dusan Ristic and Jackson-Cartwright trapped Thompson near the sideline and midcourt lines and when Thompson coughed it up, Alkins picked it up and raced in for an expressive reverse dunk that made it 29-26.
“They doubled the guy on the pick-and-roll and I just tried to read the guy’s eyes,” Alkins said. “I just read them, got the steal and I had a lot of adrenaline.”
Then he just had to decide how to put the ball in the hoop, eventually choosing to go up, spin nearly 360 degrees and slam it in backwards.
“Before I got hurt that used to be my favorite dunk,” Alkins said, but said he never hesitated this time despite the broken foot that cost him 10 weeks. “I had too much adrenaline. I didn’t even think about it. I just did it.”
But all those heroics didn’t make OSU go away. The Beavers went back ahead 35-31 with its defense continuing to throw off UA offensively.
The Wildcats took a 36-35 lead on a 3-pointer from Jackson-Cartwright with 10:25 left and pushed it to three points when Ayton crashed in for a fast-break layup. But two scores from Thompson put OSU back ahead 39-38 with 7:48 left.
UA didn’t take the lead for good until seven minutes remained, when it went on a 16-3 run.
Alkins capped that run with a transition 3-pointer from the corner after Ayton blocked OSU’s Tres Tinkle on the other end, with the Wildcats finally able to solve the Beavers’ matchup zone defense more regularly – with defense of their own.
“We have to credit them for some really good pressure defensively,” OSU coach Wayne Tinkle said. “They got physical with us and we turned it over too much. … They came out and got after us in the second half, and made a few more plays than we did.”
They were able to make those plays, in many cases, because their defense gave them the opportunity to do so.
Which had Miller a little relieved on some level.
“The more improved we are defensively, believe it or not, that will help our offense,” Miller said. “And we haven’t had a lot of problems offensively throughout this whole year. Most of our problems have come on the other side.”
With a few more games like this, the Wildcats may have the kind of defense that can creep into the Top 50, not a vintage Miller defensive team but maybe good enough to pair with UA’s powerhouse offense and carry the Wildcats to the sort of places they want to go in the postseason.
Maybe. Nothing’s for sure at this point.
“We’re a work in progress,” Miller said. “We’re improving. I wasn’t looking at jumping off any bridge after we lost our last game and certainly not celebrating like we won the Super Bowl tonight.”
