Clashing with Cardinal has made Cats uncomfortable in recent seasons

As they near their exit from the imploding Pac-12, the Arizona Wildcats are experiencing a subtle reminder this weekend about what was once, for a time, their biggest conference rival.

This is a story about ghosts, nightmares and headaches that won’t go away.

First, there was the sight at McKale Center on Thursday of Cal coach Mark Madsen, the one-time Stanford standout who helped lead the Cardinal to the 1998 Final Four and was a foundation for coach Mike Montgomery’s best Stanford teams. Madsen helped lead Stanford to the Pac-12 title in 1998-99 and a share of it with Arizona as a senior in 1999-2000.

On Sunday, another ghost of Stanford past will be sitting on the other side of Lute and Bobbi Olson Court: FS1 analyst Casey Jacobsen, the former Stanford standout who was a freshman teammate of Madsen in 1999-2000, then became an all-American who led the Cardinal win the 2000-01 title outright over a Wildcat team that went on to reach the national championship game.

After Jacobsen became a second-time all-American as a junior in 2001-02, the Phoenix Suns made him a first-round draft pick, and Montgomery left two seasons after that.

The Stanford-Arizona rivalry was never quite the same afterward, with the Wildcats winning 20 straight games between 2009-20, all but the first under former UA coach Sean Miller.

Until, ever so subtly, the tension popped back up again after the Cardinal finally broke that streak in a COVID-season game at Santa Cruz, California, on Dec. 19, 2020. Stanford edged the Wildcats 78-75 that day at the G League home of the Golden State Warriors, since the Cardinal couldn’t play at Maples Pavilion because of severe Santa Clara County COVID restrictions.

Miller was fired after that strange season, and, though not nearly as visible as it was two decades earlier, the Stanford-Arizona tension has begun tugging at both sides again.

That tension might be visible Sunday. Certainly, it was on UA coach Tommy Lloyd’s screen recently.

“I watch them on film, and I’m not comfortable,” Lloyd said of Stanford on Thursday after No. 11 Arizona beat Madsen’s Bears 91-65.

When Lloyd sees the Cardinal live, he’s also not comfortable. Because other than UCLA, no Pac-12 team in the Lloyd era has arguably caused the Wildcats more tense moments than Stanford.

Only three Pac-12 teams have beaten a Lloyd-coached Arizona team twice: UCLA, Washington State and Stanford. But the Wildcats have only had to deal with WSU four times while they have played Stanford six times since under Lloyd, and only the first game, in January 2022, was an easy Arizona victory.

Since then, for Lloyd, headaches.

After UA clinched the 2021-22 Pac-12 regular-season title with a COVID-makeup game on a Tuesday at USC, they returned two days later not to celebrate but to struggle against Stanford at McKale. The Cardinal led 39-37 at halftime, and the game was played within one possession for most of the second half before eventual NBA lottery pick Bennedict Mathurin took over late in an 81-69 UA win.

A week later, in the Pac-12 quarterfinals, Stanford took the scare a little bit further as UA won just 84-80. That game featured 22 lead changes and 28 points from Cardinal forward Spencer Jones, while UA guard Kerr Kriisa suffered a significant ankle sprain that limited him for the rest of the season.

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Then, last season, Stanford all but took big men Azuolas Tubelis and Oumar Ballo out of the game in an 88-79 win at Maples. While the teams did not meet at McKale, the Cardinal also came back to shoot 49.1% against Arizona to make the Wildcats squirm a little bit in another Pac-12 Tournament quarterfinal game UA won 95-84 – when Kriisa suffered a shoulder injury this time.

“They’ve made shots at a high level every time we’ve played them,” said UA assistant coach Riccardo Fois, who has been the lead scout for Stanford games.

That was the case no more so than during this season’s New Year’s Eve day game, after which Lloyd noted in some form not once, but 10 times, that the Wildcats simply “got our ass kicked.”

Stanford hit 16 of 25 3-pointers in its 100-82 victory, executing screens soundly but also benefiting from UA’s defensive lapses early in possessions and in fighting through the screens.

“They could have made (five) less 3s and still beat us by (three),” Lloyd fumed. “They beat us in every way, shape and form. I don’t know what it was. But it was everything.”

Now, Stanford is 11-9 overall and 6-4 in the Pac-12, one game behind the Wildcats in first place, yet not separating itself from a cluster at the top of the conference. Though he was speaking before Stanford pulled out a win at ASU on Thursday, Lloyd wondered on his radio show why the Cardinal wasn’t always the same team he has had to face.

“The Stanford team that played against us (it was) `Oh my gosh, these guys are great,’ “ Lloyd said. “Then you look at their overall record, you’re like, ‘Man, why? Why are they so inconsistent?’ ”

So, is Stanford just a bad matchup for the Wildcats? Are all these tough games a flat-out coincidence?

Or, in some under-the-radar form, is it just an old rival managing to rise up against Arizona again in the final days of the Pac-12?

“Obviously, we played a great game the first game and shot the heck out of it — and if it makes Tommy feel any better, I feel very uncomfortable when I watch them, too,” Stanford coach Jerod Haase said Friday evening after the Cardinal practiced at McKale Center.

“So from my perspective, there’s nothing that we do that’s unique and different (against the Wildcats). They know what we do. We can shoot the basketball well but the reality is, I don’t think there’s a magic secret. We’ll have to play a heck of a game to have a chance.”

A lot of history suggests the Cardinal just might.

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Photos: University of Arizona cruises past Cal 91-65, Pac 12 basketball