When Tommy Lloyd finally headed into the McKale Center interview room after a longer than usual postgame gap Saturday, the Arizona coach was greeted by a mostly stone-faced group of staffers and media.
Nobody knew exactly what his mood was going to be like. Before Washington State beat Arizona 74-61 on Saturday, Lloyd had never lost a game at McKale Center.
He had lost only five games, total, since taking over the Wildcats before last season. And this loss came by double digits to a team with a 6-10 record — a team that is probably better than 6-10, considering the number of close losses the Cougars have had, but a team that was 6-10 nonetheless.
That sort of thing doesn’t happen often at McKale. To Lloyd or anyone, at least over the past 38 years.
Then it began. Lloyd took his seat at the interview podium, before a microphone and a box score.
“All right, guys,” Lloyd said. “Why all the long looks? Why all the sad faces?”
The tone was set. Lloyd actually didn’t wait for a question before saying the Wildcats simply didn’t play well against a team with conviction and a good game plan.
Maybe the cooling-off period helped. But Lloyd was mostly, well, Lloyd. Disappointed, sure, but also offering perspective.
“Nothing crazy,” Lloyd said, when asked about his biggest overall concerns. “You just want to make sure you don’t let a day like this take your mojo, and it’s hard not to. We’re a high-character program. I love these players.
“And we’ve just all got to bounce back from it. We’ve got to come back Monday. We’ve got to show up and be excited to be there, get better and just make sure Thursday at Oregon State, we play our asses off.”
Maybe that was the biggest issue Lloyd found: A relative lack of effort and the sort of conviction he said Washington State played with.
Lloyd said he would have to review the video to see why the Wildcat guards were “losing a little bit of thrust” in not aggressively driving to the basket, though he said having big men Azuolas Tubelis and Oumar Ballo combine for 31 shots is “usually a good formula all year.”
But it didn’t come with the usual efficiency. A 58.6% shooter entering Saturday’s game, Tubelis hit 9 of his 20 shots while Ballo, still appearing to struggle from the effects of a recent hospitalization, made 4 of 11 field goal attempts and just 3 of 10 free throws.
“We didn’t make our shots that we usually make,” Tubelis said.
The Wildcats did show signs of life late in the game. With about five minutes left, Kriisa hit a 3-pointer and two free throws to pull UA within 61-56. But WSU’s TJ Bamba drove inside for a layup 14 seconds later and returned for a jumper 40 seconds after that.
Suddenly, it was back up to a nine-point WSU advantage, and the Wildcats never came any closer.
“Bamba had a big-time drive down there, right into Oumar’s chest, which is usually pretty good for us — and then somehow he banged that thing in off the glass,” Lloyd said. “If he misses that and we’re able to get a rebound — which wasn’t a given today by any stretch — we’re coming down in transition and we’re right there.
“But he finished it. Then we probably panicked a little bit and maybe made a few decisions offensively that were probably not the best.”
That sequence, and Arizona’s response, might have been a microcosm for the game.
The conviction that Lloyd spoke of in WSU was evident in the way five Cougars players blocked shots, in how the smaller Cougars scored eight second-chance points in the first half off nine offensive rebounds, and even in some non-tangential ways.
WSU, which mostly used one standout post player (Mouhamed Gueye) and four perimeter players, were out-rebounded by just four overall.
“I think it was just the rebounding and loose balls in general,” Lloyd said. “I thought they were the quicker team to the ball all night. That’s usually a recipe for a long night. We were kind of sluggish in all facets of the game. And they weren’t.”
Though Tubelis said the matchup with Gueye itself wasn’t difficult, the fact is that Gueye finished with 24 points and 14 rebounds, while also hitting a 3-point corner dagger that gave the Cougars a 68-56 lead with 1:54 left.
That made Gueye a strong candidate for the Pac-12 Player of the Week award on Monday and a key reason why the long trip home to Pullman, Washington, probably became a lot shorter.
“I can’t even imagine” what the celebration will be like, Gueye told analyst Bill Walton immediately after the game. “I think it’s going to go bananas.”
Arizona’s locker room might have been the opposite: Angry, accusatory, sad. And maybe it was.
But probably not quite all that.
“I think that stays in the locker room,” guard Kerr Kriisa said, when asked what Lloyd’s postgame message was. “But, I mean, he loves us no matter what. And he would say the same thing that I’m saying here right now — that, I hate to say it, but it was one of those days.”
No. 5 Arizona suffered its first home loss of the Tommy Lloyd era, after falling to Washington State 74-61 at McKale Center.
