It seems effortless for Helena Pueyo.
Whether Arizona’s freshman guard is driving to the basket, hitting a 3-pointer from the corner, dishing a bounce pass to a teammate, jumping to deflect a pass or grabbing a steal in the lane on defense, it looks natural.
When asked how she gets the deflections and makes those passes in narrow windows, Pueyo shrugs.
“I don’t think about it,” the 6-footer from Mallorca, Spain, said. “I just do it.”
Pueyo has been a key part of No. 18 Arizona’s 16-3 start. The Wildcats beat rival Arizona State in McKale Center on Friday night; they’ll host No. 10 UCLA (17-1, 6-1) next Friday hoping to avenge a loss from earlier in the month.
Pueyo affects the game is so many different ways, coach Adia Barnes said.
“She’ll be a star in this league — I said that from Day 1,” Barnes said. “She stretches the defense — you can’t not guard her — and then she can put the ball on the floor. She’s a great player and she’s going to be spectacular. We’ll probably be calling her some nickname like ‘The Spanish Mama’ — I don’t know, something — but she’s going to do very good in this league.”
Pueyo is shooting 41% from 3-point range. A week ago, she scored six of her 10 points in the fourth quarter in Arizona’s come-from-behind victory at Washington.
She didn’t score in Friday’s 59-53 win over the 16th-ranked Sun Devils, but she contributed in other ways. She kept pace with ASU’s Kiera Russell on a fast break and altered Russell’s shot from behind. In the third quarter, as the Wildcats were overtaking ASU, she whipped a bounce pass between two defenders to Aari McDonald, who finished with a layup, extending the lead to 33-29.
Arizona Wildcats guard Helena Pueyo (13) attempts to block a shot by Arizona State Sun Devils guard Reili Richardson (1) during a game at the McKale Center, on Jan. 24, 2020.
These are the passes that even surprise her coach.
“Every game, she has at least two dimes where you’re like, ‘I don’t know how that she made that pass,’” Barnes said. “She had one at Washington, she drove in, and somehow she got the ball and skip out to Lucia and Lucia drove and hit a shot, but I that’s something that we can’t teach. That’s her; that’s something that’s instinctual.”
It’s taken a while for Pueyo’s teammates to expect the unexpected.
“I always have to watch her,” junior forward Sam Thomas said. “Sometimes she’ll make a pass behind her and I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, is that to me?’
“At times it’s hard to read her because she’s really selfless at the core. She really looks for her teammates first. Sometimes she’ll have a wide-open layup, no one’s on her and then she passes the ball and we’re like ‘Helena, just shoot it, you’re wide open,’ but she always likes to give it to her teammates.”
Thomas was the beneficiary of Pueyo’s selflessness against ASU. Pueyo had an open look at a 3, but instead made an extra pass so her teammate could knock a shot down from the top of the key.
Arizona Wildcats guard Helena Pueyo (13) is injured on the side of the court during a game against the Oregon State Beavers at the McKale Center, on Jan. 10, 2020.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that in Arizona’s three Pac-12 losses, all to top-10 teams, Pueyo was either sick or injured. She left the Wildcats’ loss to Oregon State with a nasty ankle injury.
Barnes doesn’t think that Oregon would have stayed in their zone the entire game if Pueyo was in and hitting her shots.
“She gives us more length. Sometimes her and Sam — that’s two 6-foot wings, and they’re both shooters — give us different looks,” she said.
Pueyo has done extra conditioning to feel more confident and comfortable on her ankle and it shows. She played 28 minutes against UW and followed up with 18 against ASU.
The Wildcats are happy to have her back, and believe they can keep winning with her in the lineup.
“She brings her little foreign, Spanish style to the game,” Thomas said. “You guys have seen her little passes, her layups — how she somehow is wide open on all her layups. I don’t know how she does it. But it’s really nice to have her back.”
Rim shots
- Friday night’s win against Arizona State was Arizona’s first home victory since Dec. 21.
- Cate Reese was battling a flu-like illness on Friday, and didn’t have her usual touch on the offensive end. She played 35 minutes and finished with only five points. She added seven rebounds, five of them coming on the defensive end.
- Amari Carter
