LOS ANGELES — Just in case there’s not enough pressure on Zeke Nnaji and those who get him the ball these days, how about this?
His teammates can’t shoot, two perimeter scorers are on the sidelines, and the whole operation is running head-first into the hottest team in the Pac-12, facing first-place surprise UCLA on Saturday at what could be a sold-out and fully hyped Pauley Pavilion.
So maybe feed Zeke. Times 10.
Double-teams be damned.
It’s still the best percentage bet the Wildcats have at this point, as their woeful 57-48 loss at USC on Thursday showed.
“It’s tough, man,” Ira Lee said of getting Nnaji the ball. “It’s tough. I think we did it better in the second half but coach (Sean Miller) said we’ve definitely got to do it more.”
Nnaji took 13 field goals against USC, hitting five of them, while making 5 of 6 free throws — and passing the ball back out on several occasions in which USC’s defensive smothering made it inadvisable to put up a shot.
That meant Nnaji was only one shy of the 20 combined field goal and free throw attempts Miller has said he wants out of the freshman each game.
But that was in normal times. These are no longer normal times.
Not when Nico Mannion is 3 for 14 from the field, when Dylan Smith is 1 for 9, when Jemarl Baker is 2 for 9 and when Josh Green and Max Hazzard aren’t even on the floor.
Green didn’t make the trip to Los Angeles because of a sprained SI joint in his lower back suffered last week against Oregon, while Hazzard was out against USC and might also be against UCLA for undisclosed reasons. Miller called it a “personal” issue.
Arizona’s Zeke Nnaji, center, takes a hand in the face from Oregon guard Will Richardson during a scrum under the basket in the second half of last week’s game.
Nnaji was less than his normal efficiency, hitting 5 of 13 , but his passes back out of the post led to some other (mostly squandered) opportunities, and, besides, 5 for 13 is better than 3 for 14 or 1 for 9 or 2 for 9.
The math just isn’t that hard. And it became even clearer as time wore on Thursday, with UA shooting a miserable 28.1% against USC and missing 10 of 11 second-half 3-pointers while the Wildcats tried to get back in the game.
Miller said the Wildcats’ effort and attitude was good on Thursday, and that playing without Green and Hazzard sapped their energy down the stretch. But he also called UA’s offense “inept.”
That’s in part because it failed to get Nnaji the ball even more.
“He got a lot of action,” Miller said of Nnaji. “But I’ll tell you — in the last eight minutes when it was a single possession game, a six-point game, we had an action that we were specifically running: The ball’s got to get in there and it didn’t.”
It’s another twist to the decision-making woes that Miller has been worried about all season. Where the UA coach earlier complained that the Wildcats have taken too many silly or “circus” shots, instead of working the ball around or inside, he’s now seeing them decide to execute — in ways that don’t result in actual execution.
“It’s not like the passer isn’t throwing it on purpose,” Miller said. “He just isn’t good at being able to get it in, and some of it might be a poor decision. ... Our way of winning that was to really be able to get the ball to him down the stretch — and we weren’t able to do it at the highest level. No doubt about it.”
The difference was clear to Lee.
“We’ve got to move the ball more,” Lee said. “When we move the ball and set off ball screens, our offense looks beautiful. We kind of went away from that. (Miller) will emphasize that a lot for the UCLA game.”
The Wildcats will try to do it with a bigger lineup again against the Bruins. On Thursday, Lee started at power forward and the 6-9 Stone Gettings shifted from that spot to small forward to make up for the loss of Green.
The alternative for Miller was to start Baker on the perimeter and keep the Wildcats small but they would have eventually had to go big anyway if any of their three guards left the floor.
“If he got in foul trouble,” Miller said of Baker, “we’d be down to no guards.”
Arizona forward Zeke Nnaji, center, shoots as USC guard Elijah Weaver, left and forward Isaiah Mobley defend during the second half of Thursday’s game.
But Gettings has played small forward in practice this season, so he had familiarity with the role, and the Wildcats actually built a quick 9-2 lead early Thursday with the surprise lineup.
“I don’t think it disrupted us that much,” Lee said. “We have a lot of depth. It’s not like last year. We’ve got a lot of guys who can play.”
Except there is one comparison to last year that might appear somewhat striking this weekend: Arizona shot just 27.8% in a blowout loss at USC last season while playing without injured center Chase Jeter, who was then a key feature in the Wildcats’ offense.
Then they followed that up by shooting 33.3% in a 21-point loss at UCLA.
This time the Wildcats have Nnaji as the most effective option inside but will miss not one, but probably two, key players against the Bruins.
“We played shorthanded last year (at USC) and obviously we weren’t very good last year,” Miller said. “But we weren’t very good tonight. You take away good players and a couple key guys for us, and all of a sudden, you start to see that we don’t look the same and we didn’t tonight. We did the best we could in under a tough circumstance.”
A tough circumstance that could be even tougher Saturday.
