Scouting report: No. 4 Arizona Wildcats at Stanford Cardinal

Probable starters

ARIZONA

G Kerr Kriisa (6-3 junior)

G Courtney Ramey (6-3 senior)

F Cedric Henderson (6-6 senior)

F Azuolas Tubelis (6-11 junior)

C Oumar Ballo (7-0 junior)

STANFORD

G Michael O’Connell (6-2 junior)

G Spencer Jones (6-7 senior)

F Brandon Angel (6-8 junior)

F Harrison Ingram (6-7 sophomore)

C Maxime Raynaud (7-1 sophomore)

How they match up

The series: Arizona swept three games vs. Stanford last season, but all of the games had some scary moments for the Wildcats. UA beat Stanford 85-57 on Jan. 20 at Maples Pavilion but lost forward Azuolas Tubelis to a severely sprained ankle that forced him to miss an ensuing game at Cal and be limited the following weeks.

On March 3 at McKale Center, just two days after Arizona clinched the Pac-12 title with a win at USC, the Wildcats fell behind Stanford at halftime and led by just two points with eight minutes to go before going on to an 81-69 win.

A week later, Arizona edged Stanford 84-80 in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas. This time it was guard Kerr Kriisa who went down with a severely sprained ankle, prompting him to sit out the Wildcats’ final two games of the Pac-12 Tournament and first game of the NCAA Tournament. The game featured 22 lead changes, with the Cardinal on a roll after coming back to beat ASU with a late 16-1 run in a first-round game. Christian Koloko led the Wildcats over Stanford with 24 points, nine rebounds and four assists, while Bennedict Mathurin had 20 points and seven rebounds. Stanford hit 11 of 20 3-pointers.

Arizona leads the all-time series 71-31, having won 20 straight games before the Cardinal pulled out 78-75 COVID-season win in Santa Cruz, California, on Dec. 19, 2020.

This season: The Cardinal will not play the Wildcats at McKale Center this season because of the Pac-12’s unbalanced schedule. UA is scheduled to play nine Pac-12 teams twice but Stanford (at Maples) and Colorado (at McKale) only once.

Stanford overview

The Cardinal faced higher expectations this season after finishing last season on a strong note, partly because of how they played against Arizona — and also because former five-star recruit Harrison Ingram opted to return for a sophomore season. But Stanford hasn’t met those expectations, losing five straight games early in Pac-12 play and its last two games, getting beaten soundly at Colorado 84-72 last Saturday and blowing a 13-point lead in a 69-65 loss to ASU at Maples on Thursday. The Cardinal hit 12 of 29 3-pointers against ASU but managed just 11-for-33 shooting from 2-point range.

With a load of big, mostly interchangeable wing players who aim to run a slower pace, the Cardinal can be a difficult team to guard on the perimeter and are also versatile defensively. Stanford’s mediocre shooting percentages have also improved notably in conference play: It is third in 3-point shooting in conference games (34.1) and fifth in 2-point shooting (49.5).

Spencer Jones, who had 28 points for Stanford in the Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinal game against Arizona last season, is leading the Cardinal in scoring at 13.5 points a game while shooting 42.2% overall and 37.7% from 3-point range, where he takes half of his shots.

The Cardinal have similarly sized players in Ingram, Brandon Angel and Max Murrell, while the 7-1 Maxime Raynaud has taken over at center, especially after James Keefe went out with a lower leg injury last month. In the backcourt, Davidson grad transfer Michael Jones has started off the ball, while Michael O’Connell is in his third season as starting point guard.

He said it

“They’re very similar team (to last season), but there are a couple of new guys and (Michael) Jones is a really good player. They’ve been really hot. Probably should have won (against ASU). It’s kind of like last year — they’re playing better at the end of the year. So I expect it to be an absolute fight.

“They have size, big wings like Spencer Jones, Michael Jones, Murrell. They’re capable of shooting over you. In conference, they are one of the top shooting teams, and they execute very well what they try to do offensively.

“Spencer Jones is an elite scorer. He can just shoot over you, so he’s a huge danger. Angel is a matchup problem. He plays the four and the five. Ingram is a big, big guard who can post up and can go downhill. So I think those are the three (to watch out for). They put you in tough spots with those kinds of guys. They always put other teams in a conundrum of you’ve gotta make some decisions on what you’re going to live with.

“And even a guy like Raynaud as a five man can open up the floor and shoot to an extent. He can knock down a 3, has good hands and touch around the rim, got a lot more physical than he was last year. You can see one year of lifting and getting stronger and maturing. He’s more comfortable, and they switch with him, every pick and roll.

“They’ll switch one through five. I don’t think we have played a team that does that for a while. Colorado next week will do it to an extent, but Stanford is really committed to it. They did it to us last year, and I think they’re pretty good at it.”

“(At Maples last season) I think we were able to build a lead and then kind of control the tempo of that game. In the other two games, they controlled the tempo. So that’s going to be one of the keys — are we going to be able to get enough stops to make it the kind of game we like? But this year, we also won a lot of slow-paced games with opponents that got us in a dogfight. So whatever is gonna happen, we’ve just got to be able to maintain our principles and play hard on them. I honestly think tomorrow’s gonna be a really hard game because Stanford is waiting. This is a big game, and they’ve been playing good basketball.”

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— UA assistant coach Riccardo Fois, who scouted the Cardinal

Key players

STANFORD — Spencer Jones

Jones had one of the strangest box-score lines in the Cardinal’s loss to ASU on Thursday, making 5 of 7 3-pointers over the Sun Devil defense but unable to make any of the five shots he took inside the arc. Still, Jones’ size and history against Arizona — scoring 50 points combined over the last two games with the Wildcats last season — makes him dangerous.

ARIZONA — Pelle Larsson

Stanford can throw out a lineup with four 6-7 or 6-8 guys, all of whom are in between the size of power forward Azuolas Tubelis and small forward Cedric Henderson. As a result, the defensive versatility of Larsson could be especially important in this matchup, with Larsson able to guard virtually any position.

Sidelines

Cardinal on rise (maybe)

So what happened to that Stanford team that stretched out the Wildcats in those two March games last season? The same guys, the same big wings, are largely still there … but the results haven’t been, until lately at least.

Still, both UA coach Tommy Lloyd and Fois appear to be expecting the same sort of team they faced at McKale Center early last March and in the Pac-12 Tournament a week later.

Especially since Stanford won five straight games before dropping its past two.

“Stanford’s been playing really well,” Lloyd said. “They’re a team that’s fallen into some stuff offensively and defensively that they’re comfortable with. That doesn’t mean they won’t make adjustments against us, but I think they’re playing with tremendous purpose now and they have really talented players.”

If nothing else, Stanford can make its season considerably brighter by beating Arizona — and knows that it almost did exactly that last season.

“You can’t underestimate that,” Fois said. “For a team that maybe started the season with higher expectations, now they can, to an extent, salvage their season or prove to themselves that they have the capabilities of beating good teams.”

Under the weather

While he wasn’t attributing the 0-for-7 shooting of Kriisa at Cal on Thursday to an illness that sidelined him for most of the week in practice, Lloyd said it was a substantial obstacle.

“He got really sick,” Lloyd said. “It’s going around this time of the year. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, he wasn’t really around that much. So for him to kind of work in a little bit of practice (Wednesday) and come out and give us minutes (at Cal) when he wasn’t feeling his best says a lot about his character and the team player he is.”

Kriisa wasn’t the only Wildcat bogged down this week either. Without going into detail, Lloyd said “it’s going around a little bit; it’s normal stuff but nothing crazy.”

Ballo named to Abdul-Jabbar list

Tubelis finally found some familiar company on the national stage this week.

On Friday, at the end of a week when Tubelis picked up multiple player-of-the-week honors and was named a top-10 pick for the Karl Malone Award, center Oumar Ballo was named to a top-10 list for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award, given to the top center in college basketball.

While the award is likely headed to Purdue’s Zach Edey, who is also the frontrunner for overall player of the year, Ballo proved his credentials against another player on the Abdul-Jabbar List.

In Arizona’s 81-79 win over Creighton in the Maui Invitational final on Nov. 23, Ballo had 30 points on 14-for-17 shooting and 13 rebounds while Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner had 16 points and five rebounds while shooting 5 for 8 from the field.

For the season, Ballo is averaging 15.0 points and 9.7 rebounds while shooting 65.7% from 2-point range, the 61st-best percentage nationally. Ballo also ranks 17th in fouls drawn per 40 minutes (6.8) and 131st nationally in block percentage (5.4).

Others on the Abdul-Jabbar list include: Oscar Tshiebwe, Kentucky; Hunter Dickinson, Michigan; Armando Bacot, North Carolina; Clifford Omoruyi, Rutgers; Joel Soriano, St. John’s; Adama Sanogo, UConn; and Jack Nunge, Xavier

Numbers game

1 — Arizona loss in 17 games when the Wildcats have made at least eight 3-point shots.

9 — Seasons since a Pac-12 Freshman of the Year returned for his sophomore year before Harrison Ingram did this season. The last to return for a second year was ASU’s Jahii Carson in 2013-14.

10 — Stanford’s rank in Kenpom’s “Minutes continuity” rating, a formula that measures what percentage of a team’s minutes is played by the same players from last season to this season.