Saint Mary's to give Arizona Wildcats yet another preseason test behind closed doors

Because he wanted to test his guys early against a well-regarded, highly structured and mostly unfamiliar team, former Arizona coach Sean Miller arranged for the Wildcats to play Saint Mary’s in closed preseason scrimmages four times over his 12 seasons with the Wildcats.

New Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd will continue that “series” Saturday when the Wildcats and Gaels meet in a closed scrimmage in Phoenix.

Except, for him, the unfamiliar part hardly applies.

Over Lloyd’s 20 seasons as an assistant with Gonzaga, the Bulldogs faced the Gaels 52 times, often twice during the regular season and then again in the West Coast Conference Tournament.

Gonzaga won 41 of those games, but the wins were not always easy. The Gaels were always testing the Zags, too.

While the NCAA does not allow schools to formally publicize closed scrimmages in advance, the Wildcats and Gaels have long been known to have arranged for another meeting this preseason. So when Lloyd found that out upon taking the UA job in April, he and longtime Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett didn’t need long to discuss it.

“We have a mutual respect,” Lloyd said. “I’ve played against Saint Mary’s probably more than any other team in my career, and vice versa, so right when I got the job, Randy and I talked and it totally made sense to continue to do it. I didn’t even give it a second thought.”

Having lost two of their best shooters last December to injuries, Saint Mary’s shot a miserable 29.4% from 3-point range last season but ranked 13th in defensive efficiency while running the 10th slowest tempo in the country. They finished 14-10, or 14-7 against teams other than Gonzaga.

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This season, Saint Mary’s was picked to finish third in the WCC’s official preseason poll, behind, of course, Gonzaga, as well as BYU. The Gaels return all 12 scholarship players while adding Lithuanian point guard Augustas Marciulionis, the son of former NBA player Sarunas Marciulionis and a teammate of UA’s Azuolas Tubelis on the Lithuanian U19 team that competed in the FIBA World Cup in July.

The two Lithuanians and two head coaches are familiar with each other. For everyone else, however, things will be different.

“It’ll be our first time competing against somebody else and we’re going to be competing against a really good team that’s well-coached, so I think it’s gonna expose a lot of things and maybe show us a few things about ourselves,” Lloyd said.

In “intrasquad scrimmages, there’s a comfort level everybody has with each other. But going against somebody else that’s well-coached and well organized … you don’t know everything they’re going to do.”

The Wildcats have already held several intrasquad scrimmages, including one during the Red-Blue Game on Oct. 2. But, for the first time since most of the team began practicing together in July, they’ll be facing somebody else this time.

“We’re tired of practicing,” center Christian Koloko said. “We’ve been practicing for a while, like four months. We just want to play.”