UA season in review: How Wildcats went from Pac-12 tourney champs to NCAA flameouts

When Arizona players lined up in a cramped Lahaina Civic Center press room last November to watch Oumar Ballo kiss his Maui Invitational MVP trophy, a lei of kukui nets and ti leaves draped over his shoulder, it was easy to imagine the Wildcats’ standout big man might do the same sort of thing in Houston four-plus months later.

Minus the lei, of course.

The Wildcats were 6-0 at that point, having averaged 97.5 points, about to rise to the No. 4 spot in the Associated Press men’s basketball poll. They appeared more a contender to reach the Final Four in Houston than a team scrambling to deal with the loss of three players to the NBA draft.

Until a week later, that is.

Riding that tropical intoxication into the cold and high elevation of Salt Lake City, the Wildcats were smacked 81-66 by a Utah team that was picked to finish 10th in the Pac-12 and ultimately finished seventh.

“We got punched,” UA coach Tommy Lloyd said two months later, just before Utah came to Tucson on Feb. 16. “We got punched by a good team that was playing at home and had a spirited effort. That’s what I remember.”

Arizona beat Utah 88-62 at McKale Center, the third of six times that the Wildcats avenged a loss, something that became a defining characteristic of the 2022-23 Wildcats — a team that put together streaks better than anyone in the country, only to be brought down to earth by humbling losses that sometimes lingered.

The worst of them included that Dec. 1 game at Utah, a Jan. 7 game vs. Washington State at home, a loss at Stanford at a near-empty Maples Pavilion on Feb. 11 and, finally, Arizona’s shocking 59-55 loss to 15th-seeded Princeton in the NCAA Tournament, when the Wildcats gave up a 12-point lead to the Ivy League champs.

“I don’t want to say that we kind of loosened up,” UA guard Kerr Kriisa said. “But they made their shots when they needed it, and they made some tough ones.”

It was the final descent of a season that featured both remarkable highs and lows. Here’s how it went:

The initial ascent

Even without Texas grad-transfer guard Courtney Ramey, who was suspended for the Wildcats’ first three games for playing in a predraft camp that wasn’t sanctioned by the NCAA, the Wildcats steamrolled their first three opponents at McKale Center. They beat Nicholls, Southern and Utah Tech by an average of 32 points, then moved Ramey into the starting lineup as they headed to Maui.

On the island, the Wildcats firmly established their identity: They were going to power the ball inside to Ballo and Azuolas Tubelis, who both became All-Pac-12 first team picks and contenders for several national honors.

In wins over Cincinnati, San Diego State and Creighton — all first-round winners in the NCAA Tournament — Ballo averaged 21.0 points and 11.7 rebounds, while Tubelis averaged 18.7 and 8.3. Together, they helped the Wildcats outscore their three Maui opponents 136-71 in the paint.

“We love attacking inside out,” Lloyd said after UA doubled Cincinnati in paint points in the Maui first-round game. “We want to play north-south, and I thought our guys did a good job for the most part.”

The wakeup call

Things felt immediately different for the Wildcats after tipoff on Dec. 1 in Salt Lake City. Arizona missed its first five shots and never led the Utes, going on to shoot just 35.2% overall, including a dismal 4-for-28 mark from 3-point range.

Lloyd acknowledged that some of the Wildcats’ performance was due to what he has referred to as “rat poison,” the head-swelling publicity that can result from the sort of success the Wildcats enjoyed in Maui.

“When you have Arizona on your chest you expect the other team’s best shot, and obviously their shot was a lot better than ours tonight,” Lloyd said. “We didn’t match it, especially early in the game, and we’re a team that likes to set the tone with effort and energy.”

The second rise

The Wildcats still appeared somewhat shaken up in their next game but were fortunate to be playing the woeful Cal Golden Bears. They won that game 81-68 and rebuilt enough confidence and rhythm to go on the second of three strong stretches, beating Indiana in Las Vegas and Tennessee at McKale Center. (Those two also made the NCAA Tournament and won their first-round games.)

During that period, the Wildcats again asserted their inside dominance, even against Indiana all-American Trayce Jackson-Davis and Tennessee’s rugged defense.

Ballo and Tubelis combined for 36 points and 19 rebounds against Indiana, while Jackson-Davis had just 11 points and five rebounds, and Tubelis went on to make up for being what he called “lost” in Arizona’s 77-73 win at Tennessee last season.

Against the Vols this time, Tubelis had 19 points on 7-for-11 shooting while grabbing nine rebounds. Ballo added 18 points and eight rebounds.

“Oumar and Zu, we’ve got to get that out of them every night no matter how they guard us ... they’re a force in there,” Lloyd said after the Tennessee game. “Those two are dominant guys.”

New Year’s slippage

Arizona went on to win eight straight games after their loss in Utah, but the Wildcats started slipping backward again once they returned home after a Christmas break.

They took a 45-38 halftime lead at ASU on New Year’s Eve day, then nearly kicked it all away: ASU cut it to two points after the Wildcats made just 2 of 11 shots to begin the second half and had four turnovers in the first eight minutes.

Later that night, Ballo came down with a bacterial infection that sent him to the hospital three times. Ballo managed to play 34 minutes on Jan. 5 against Washington, but even that couldn’t hold off the Wildcats’ slippage: Arizona fell behind Washington by 14 points in the first half but came back to win in part because of a rowdy late-night crowd at McKale Center that stood up nearly the entire second half.

“We need them to be full participants,” Lloyd said afterward. “I thought they made an incredible environment for a Monday night, in early January at 9 p.m.”

It was actually a Thursday, but Lloyd had clearly been through a stressful night, even calling a rare early-half timeout less than three minutes after halftime, when the Huskies threatened to build up another double-digit lead.

Two days later, it was even worse for Lloyd and the Wildcats: Washington State held them to 31.7% shooting in a 74-61 Arizona loss that was the Wildcats’ second shocker of the season.

It was the first time the Wildcats had lost at home under Lloyd, and the first time they had lost at all before fans in Tucson since 2019-20. That meant Tubelis and guard Kerr Kriisa, who played in front of cardboard cutouts as freshmen during the 2020-21 “COVID season,” had never seen fans stream out of McKale after a loss.

“It feels like s—-,” Kriisa said.

Arizona appeared to fix its problems in an 86-74 win at Oregon State on Jan. 12, but the Wildcats suffered their biggest loss by margin of the entire season two days later: Oregon drilled UA 87-68.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

The Ducks held the Wildcats to just 37.5% shooting, outrebounded them 42-32 and scored 19 points off 16 Arizona turnovers.

“Beat them in every category,” Oregon coach Dana Altman said.

New-look surge

In the hours after the humbling loss at Eugene, Lloyd said he began thinking about swapping grad-transfer forward Cedric Henderson for junior Pelle Larsson in the starting lineup. Lloyd went with it in the next game, and it paid off immediately in Arizona’s 81-66 win over USC.

Having averaged just 2.8 points over Arizona’s previous four games, Henderson had 11 points and seven rebounds against the Trojan. Larsson, the Pac-12’s Sixth Man of the Year last season, had 15 points, three rebounds and three assists.

As the weeks went on, both Larsson and Henderson said they were comfortable in the new roles, with Henderson more confidently resuming the sort of starting role he had at Campbell during three previous seasons, while Larsson elevated the bench, playing with more freedom knowing that he didn’t have to worry about picking up early fouls.

The Wildcats won their first seven games with the new lineup, including a 63-58 revenge win at Washington State that they led wire to wire.

“It’s about how you finish, so I’m just happy to be on the court,” Larsson said. “I think energy from the start and from the bench has gotten better.”

Zu-keeping

Because the Wildcats relied so heavily on Ballo and Tubelis all season, with Lloyd trimming down to a tight seven-man rotation after New Year’s, it wasn’t a surprise that the team’s fortunes followed theirs.

So when Tubelis fell into early foul trouble at Stanford on Feb. 11, an 88-79 loss resulted. Coming nine days after he dropped 40 points on Oregon to pick up national Player of the Week honors, Tubelis had just four points and no rebounds in a 17-minute effort at Maples Pavilion.

Although Tubelis said he never felt the pressure of increasing expectations as the season rolled on, citing only foul trouble as the problem, his frustration continued to be visible. After picking up a personal foul in the Wildcats’ next game, on Feb. 16 against Utah, he kicked the ball into the ZonaZoo student section and received a technical.

“You can’t do what Zu did,” Lloyd said. “Zu is a great kid. He’s had an incredible year, but you can’t boot the ball up into the stands. This isn’t like open gym. I mean, this is a game with rules and customs and standards

“Obviously a disappointing decision by Zu.”

Tubelis began finding his rhythm again by the time ASU entered McKale for the Wildcats’ home finale on Feb. 25. But Sun Devil guard Desmond Cambridge spoiled the occasion by hitting one of the most memorable shots in UA-ASU basketball history, a 60-footer as time expired to give the Sun Devils an 89-88 victory.

“If I’m being completely honest, I make those shots all the time, but that shot I really did not think was going in,” Cambridge said. “I really just wanted it to be a nice miss and everyone in the crowd would go, ‘Ooh.’ When it went in, I could only scream because it still doesn’t make sense to me.”

Cambridge’s improbable shot, coupled with the Wildcats’ 82-73 loss at UCLA a week later, all but ensured Arizona had slipped below the Bruins on the overall NCAA Tournament seed line after UA was ahead of UCLA during the committee’s early reveal on Feb. 18.

Ultimately, that meant UCLA would stay in the West Region while UA headed to the South, resulting in the Wildcats facing Princeton in the first round instead of UNC Asheville, whom the Bruins drilled 86-53.

The revenge tour

Having fallen into a second-place tie with USC for second place in the Pac-12 at 14-6, the Wildcats offset some of that disappointment at the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas. While doing so, they also avenged three losses, beating Stanford in the quarterfinals, ASU in the semifinals and UCLA in the finals.

“We love it,” Henderson said after UA’s 78-59 win over ASU in the semifinals “We couldn’t ask for anything better. We get the teams that we want to play. These are personal games. It’s different.”

But playing three games in three days with a seven-player rotation was a stress test that didn’t go well for the Wildcats: Kriisa separated his shoulder against Stanford, Ballo broke his left hand against ASU and Kriisa picked up a cut on his shooting hand against UCLA.

Still wearing wraps on his hand and shoulder in the Wildcats’ NCAA Tournament first-round game Thursday against Princeton, Kriisa was 1 for 7 with two assists and four turnovers. Ballo managed a double-double with 13 points and 12 rebounds but said he tried to limit his left hand because he didn’t have “great control of the ball” with it.

The final meltdown

Kriisa and Lloyd both said they didn’t want to use injuries as an excuse for their historical loss to Princeton, only the 11th time a No. 2 seed has lost to a No. 15 in the first round — a humbling accomplishment the Wildcats have actually done twice after losing to No. 15 Santa Clara in 1993.

“We’ll never know,” Lloyd said. “I’m sure everybody has injuries this time of year. Our players that were a little banged up, they were out there and they were functioning. … I don’t know if that really had anything to do with it.”

Whatever the case, Kriisa and Larsson both cited a lack of energy against Princeton, maybe even the same sort of vibe the Wildcats had carried into the Huntsman Center over three months earlier.

They had, after all, carried a trophy out of Las Vegas just as they did from Maui. And by the time they snipped the nets in Las Vegas, they had avenged every single one of their six regular-season losses.

But they will never get a chance to avenge Princeton.

Instead, Arizona coaches, players and fans alike will be stuck with the memory of this one for years, probably even decades.

“We had a great season,” Lloyd said when it was over Thursday afternoon at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento. “Obviously, we’re still trying to build and develop this program. I’m still trying to develop as a coach. I think we were ranked in the top 10 for most of the year. These guys earned that. I think we performed well on lots of big stages.

“Unfortunately, ultimately you’re going to be judged sometimes how you play in this tournament. That’s the good and the bad of it.”

<&rule>