Last year’s game between Arizona and Oregon State was postponed just as the Wildcats were about to land in Oregon. COVID-19 protocols within the Beavers’ program were to blame.
The good news Wednesday was that when the Wildcats landed, the game was still on.
The bad news: No. 7-ranked Arizona (11-1, 1-1 Pac-12) will once again be without starters Shaina Pellington and Lauren Ware.
Pellington, the UA’s regular point guard, did not play last weekend for undisclosed reasons. Ware, a post player, has been out with a knee injury since Dec. 9.
Both “could be available on Sunday or possibly next week,” coach Adia Barnes said Wednesday as her team rode the bus to Corvallis. “We haven’t decided yet.”
Ware was initially only expected to miss one or two weeks, but has taken longer to recover. She was seen on the bench in street clothes during Friday’s 60-52 win over Washington State in McKale Center. She did not travel with the Wildcats to USC on Sunday, where Arizona suffered its first loss of the 2021-22 season.
Barnes said Ware won’t play until she is closer to game shape. “Structurally,” Barnes added, “her knee is fine.”
“I think a lot of coaches make a mistake when you bring someone back and they play 30 minutes. I don’t think that’s conducive for the future when you are going to be playing for a while,” Barnes said. “But I think that easing someone back when they’re ready to limited minutes is better. She’s just not ready to do that yet.”
Teams are dealing with more than just injuries these days. Long COVID-19 outbreaks have teams looking a bit tired.
Last Friday marked the Wildcats’ first game in 25 days because of a virus outbreak within their program, as well as UCLA’s and USC’s. Thursday’s will be Oregon State’s first time back in nearly as long.
“Coming off of 25-30 days off is tough; you’re rusty,” Barnes said. “I think it takes time. Because if you’re practicing, the difference is you’re not in game shape. I think you saw on Friday (against WSU) we were tired but just getting back in the rhythm. Then you saw Sunday we were completely exhausted. Not an excuse. USC had just traveled in Colorado, but it takes it think a month or three weeks to get back into the game shape. You won’t see teams rested. I think you’ll see a lot of upsets — not such beautiful basketball.”
Next player up
Helena Pueyo is expected to start at point guard with Pellington out, while Ariyah Copeland will start in the post.
The Wildcats have struggled to replace Ware’s presence down low.
“Whenever she’s in, there’s definitely good things going on,” forward Cate Reese said. “Lauren is a really good shot blocker and just her height on defense is great. She’s really active on defense against opposing players. That was missing at time, but I think that Ariyah did a really good job coming in, stepping up and giving us good minutes.
“…It’s definitely an adjustment, but we can’t dwell on that … but at the end of the day, we have to make those adjustments. We don’t really think too much about the differences. We just think about how we can attack the other team based on people that we have on the floor.”
Responding from the loss
The Wildcats took Monday off, then went back to the basics on Tuesday. Their focus: defense.
Barnes said the UA lacked intensity and energy on defense in Sunday’s 76-67 loss to USC, which is not typical for the Wildcats.
“We learned against USC you can’t take anybody lightly and you’ve got to bring your ‘A’ game every day,” she said. “I am curious to see how we’re going to respond after that loss.”
The Wildcats must try to defend a pair of big forwards: Oregon State’s Kennedy Brown is 6 feet 6 inches tall, while Taylor Jones stands 6-4.
“I think the challenging thing is they play completely drastically different style than we play,” Barnes said. “They play the packline — 3 feet off you, but you can’t shoot they don’t guard you. Similar to Stanford and some other teams. They are not going to press us, they’re not going to try to turn us over. Contrasting styles. We’ll try to speed it up and they’re going to try to slow it down to see how we’re going to react to that. We haven’t played a team this big like that just stays inside. It should be a fun game.”
No pressure
Arizona was only one of two undefeated teams left in the country heading into Sunday’s game.
While it seems like there might have been extra pressure to keep the streak alive, Barnes said that wasn’t the case.
“To be honest, it didn’t feel like we were undefeated. There was zero pressure,” Barnes said. “I don’t think there was a lot of thought on (the streak). It was more … it felt like we were just starting the conference because to be off almost a month and then we think about it. It was 20, 30 days without a game. But the two games before that, we didn’t play the starters a lot. We rotated a lot of players and really the starters had not played a lot of legitimate minutes for like 30 days or less than a month.
“I think the loss was just the result of not showing up that day and playing bad. We didn’t defend basic things … We’ve never allowed teams to get points on a baseline out of bounds – that’s stuff that we don’t do. It showed me we weren’t ready. It’s my responsibility as a coach to make sure we’re ready and then address the things that we weren’t good at.”
Reese said there’s pressure “just in general” now that the Wildcats are nationally ranked.
“The transition from my freshman year when we were kind of underdogs (to) now having a target on our back in every game … there was a little bit of pressure (to keep the streak alive),” she said. “(Sunday there was) a little bit of a lapse in our defense that we can’t really afford to have and gives teams confidence to play against us.”
Rim shot
• Three of Arizona's Class of 2022 commits — Maya Nnaji, Paris Clark and Kailyn Gilbert — have been nominated for the McDonald’s All-American Game. Clark and Nnaji have also been named to the Naismith Girls High School player of the year midseason list.
