Dad’s critical eye
Sitting among the regulars in the UA parents’ section Thursday was a 6-foot-9 man with an unfamiliar face.
It’s a little tougher for Lauri Markkanen’s dad, Pekka, to see his son play, after all.
But Pekka made the Helsinki-London-Las Vegas trek just to take in his 7-foot son’s two games in the Las Vegas Invitational this week. He said he’s planning to return to the U.S. in February and maybe even before that, but he’s been busy with his career in medical supplies.
Formerly having played at Kansas and in European pro leagues, Pekka has pretty high standards for his son. Even though Lauri entered Thursday’s game averaging 19.5 points and 8.3 rebounds, dad says he still has some work to do.
“He has some problems on defense,” Pekka said.
Early Thanksgiving
A big, heavy turkey-and-all-the-trimmings meal might be just the thing for most Americans on Thanksgiving, but not for the Arizona Wildcats.
After all, pregame meals are about gaining energy. Not inducing sleep and/or laziness.
“You don’t want turkey and stuffing before a game,” said Ryan Reynolds, UA’s director of basketball operations.
So the Wildcats instead had their big meal Wednesday evening after arriving in Las Vegas, then stuck with the usual pasta-and-chicken pregame buffet Thursday.
“I would say it was a traditional Thanksgiving meal,” Reynolds said of Wednesday’s spread. “Turkey, ham at a carving station, stuffing, sweet potatoes, all the usual things.”
The Wildcats’ “move” of Thanksgiving is becoming a nearly annual thing. The NCAA now allows teams to play in multi-team events every year and many of them are clustered over Thanksgiving week. Teams are attracted to the “MTEs” because most give them a free game toward the NCAA scheduling maximum.
Last year, the Wildcats held “Thanksgiving” on Wednesday before playing in Fullerton, Calif., and they’ll probably do some sort of adjustment next season while playing in the Battle 4 Atlantis (if they even want to celebrate Thanksgiving, since it isn’t an official holiday in the Bahamas).
Which Wildcats?
Die-hard Wildcats fans without two television screens handy might need to fire up the WatchESPN or Fox Sports Go apps tonight.
By winning Thursday’s game, the Wildcats will play at 8:30 p.m. Arizona time on Friday – just when the football Wildcats should be into the second quarter of their season finale against ASU.
That could mean fewer UA fans show up in Las Vegas, except those who live locally or cruise up from Southern California, but Reynolds is OK with that.
“It puts us in a tough spot,” Reynolds said. “But we need people to go to the football game.”
Rare miss
The conflict is also forcing UA play-by-play announcer Brian Jeffries to skip one of only a handful of Wildcat basketball games he hasn’t been able to work since 1987.
“I’ve probably only missed a dozen or so,” Jeffries said. “But I’ve never missed a football game.”
The end of the football season often poses conflicts for Jeffries, but usually he can work it out, even calling both the New Mexico Bowl and a UA-Florida basketball game at McKale in 2012 thanks to a private jet that shuttled him from Albuquerque to Tucson.
The good news for UA is that Ryan Radtke, a former Tucson sports radio voice, will be in Las Vegas in his role as Nevada’s football play-by-play man. So he’ll cover for Jeffries on Friday while working his day job when the Wolf Pack face UNLV on Saturday.
Shot of energy
In a game that changed leads five times, Butler finally pulled away from Vanderbilt with a 17-3 second-half run, winning 76-66 to reach the Las Vegas Invitational final.
“I thought we responded when we needed to,” Butler coach Chris Holtmann said. “We told them at (a late) timeout ‘If we’re not excited about playing in a close game in this kind of environment, then we’re not ready to do this. It was good for us to be in that environment.”
Herbivore allergies
That Thursday's game wasn't easy for Sean Miller comes as no surprise if you consider history.
Santa Clara coach Herb Sendek, after all, handed him some pretty painful losses as ASU’s head coach.
In 2009-10, Sendek’s Sun Devils beat Miller’s first UA team in McKale Center, 73-69, all but ensuring the Wildcats would break their NCAA tournament streak of 25 years (which is now just a 10-year streak, since the 1999 appearance was vacated because of NCAA violations).
As it turned out, the Wildcats finished the season 16-15 and didn’t go to the NIT either.
In 2011-12, ASU beat Arizona 87-80 at Wells Fargo Arena, sending the Wildcats to 21-10 in a weak season for the Pac-12 and prompting Solomon Hill to correctly declare "we just popped the bubble."
In 2013-14, the Sun Devils knocked off a UA team ranked as high as No. 2, winning 69-66 in double overtime. The win caused so much distress in the UA locker room that no Wildcat players were allowed to speak with media afterward and Miller's postgame address was cut off by the team’s PR person after three minutes and 11 seconds.
In 2014-15, ASU again won at Wells Fargo Arena, this time 81-78. It was the Wildcats' third and final loss of the regular season, but enough to knock them down to a No. 2 NCAA tournament seed in the West. That ultimately provided an opening for Wisconsin to slip into the West as a No. 1 seed – which in turn paved the way for Arizona’s second straight fruitless meeting with the Badgers in the Elite Eight.
The big number
5 — Games and counting that Arizona guard Allonzo Trier has missed because of an eligibility issue.
Quotable
“It’s a terrific program, well-coached and they play really hard and with discipline. If that’s who we play, it’s going to be a tremendous challenge but this is why you come to these types of events. … You want to do it against a high-caliber team.”
— Butler’s Holtmann, speaking before UA played Santa Clara, on a possible matchup with the Wildcats on Friday.
— Bruce Pascoe
