No matter how bad things get for the Arizona Wildcats, they’ll always have the Maui Invitational to look back at.
Not only was Justin Coleman on the all-tournament team, but the Wildcats’ win over Iowa State and the fact that they played Gonzaga and Auburn appear to be helping UA’s NET and power ratings from taking a complete nose dive during their seven-game losing steal.
Arizona has a No. 66 Sagarin rating and is 87 in both the NET ratings and Kenpom, despite seven straight losses and a 14-12 overall record. The Wildcats were 84 in the NET last week before losing at Utah and Colorado.
Of course, ratings don’t mean much at this point. Arizona almost certainly is out of the running for an at-large NCAA Tournament berth – unless, maybe, the Wildcats win their final five regular-season games, then beat Washington and two other teams in the Pac-12 Tournament before losing in the final.
They can hope.
“We’re not the only team in college basketball struggling, so anything could happen,” Dylan Smith said. “We can go on a run in March. We’ve just got to stay the course, trust the process, keep working hard. Everybody in this locker room works hard every day so we'll be fine. It's just tough losing.”
The Wildcats can also take heart in the fact that their next opponent, California, has it even worse.
Much, much worse. The Bears lost a school-record 13th straight game on Wednesday in overtime to UCLA.
“Everybody was just down,” Cal’s Darius McNeill said of the locker room after the UCLA game, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “We had it. We practiced so hard. We had a good scheme. … We were doing everything we could. It was just a few missed assignments at the end, and we paid for it.”
Cal went on to lose No. 14 on Saturday against USC.
UA coach Sean Miller continued to look for positives -- within the context of what the shorthanded Wildcats have to offer -- after the Colorado game.
The Wildcats gave up more than 50-percent shooting for the fifth time in the past six games, something that might have been unfathomable to Miller with some of his previous teams, but he said they played with effort but just “ran out of gas” with Brandon Williams out and Alex Barcello getting his knee banged up.
“We played good defense for a long period of time,” Miller said. “Our lack of depth hurts us defensively and on offense there are times like we started the game off where you wondered if we're ever going to score. But once we got through that patch, we played some good offense. So it's about playing for 40 minutes we don't have a lot of room for error and hopefully this week we can we can get there.”
Later, Miller said:
“We're really thin right now, just in terms of our overall depth. I mean, look at a guy like Dylan Smith. He played as hard as he could. But you know, being in the role that he has, he can wear down and I wish I could help them a little bit more. But that's part of it, learning how to play when you’re really fatigued and try to get to the finish line.”
CBS Bracketology has Washington as a No. 8 seed and ASU in a play-in game. The Huskies also remain out of the AP Top 25 poll, though they received the 29th most votes. (FWIW, this was my ballot.)
Stanford's Josh Sharma beat out Colorado's McKinley Wright and others for the Pac-12's Player of the Week award.
Our coverage from Boulder is attached, along with PDFs of the box score and updated stats.
