Just before Terrell Brown walked through Arizona’s Senior Day festivities last season, his godfather lamented that the then-Wildcat guard might leave without having played a single game in front of McKale Center crowds.
“What we told him is he’s given us all he’s had but we haven’t given him everything we have to offer,” said Jason Terry, a lifelong friend of Brown’s father who was an assistant UA coach last season, when fans were not allowed to watch games in person because of the coronavirus pandemic. “He’s really been cheated out of the experience of playing at a school like Arizona. I witnessed it. I lived it, and that’s really why I wanted him to come here.”
Well, Brown will get to experience it Thursday. But in what might be a fitting cap to his peripatetic college basketball career, he’ll be doing so while playing for Washington. The 11th-ranked Wildcats will open Pac-12 play against Washington with a 6:30 p.m. game in front of fans at McKale.
Brown’s story was already unusual when he arrived at Arizona in the summer of 2020, an exhausting trek up the college basketball ladder.
Basically unrecruited out of Seattle’s star-studded Garfield High School in 2016, Brown went to Division II Western Oregon but wound up taking the year off, then went to a Seattle-area junior college. He walked on at Seattle University in 2018, worked his way into the Redhawks’ starting lineup and was a first-team all-WAC player in 2019-20.
Seeking a bigger stage in 2020-21, and seeing Terry had joined what became Sean Miller’s final UA staff, Brown committed to the Wildcats in the Zoom-only recruiting environment of April 2020. He started nine of 26 games for Arizona last season and posted nearly a 4-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio, but was somewhat overshadowed by all-conference point guard James Akinjo in the Wildcats’ backcourt.
Before playing that Senior Day game at McKale — against Washington, of all teams — Brown declined to say whether he’d use the the extra year of eligibility granted to everyone who participated in the COVID-plagued 2020-21 season. Or where he’d be playing this season.
“We play Washington at noon on Saturday and Oregon on Monday,” Brown said. “That’s where I’m focusing. … I’m trying to finish up my classes right now and get prepared for Washington. At noon. Saturday. CBS.”
Wildcats guard Terrell Brown spent the 2020-21 season at the UA, where his godfather, former Arizona star Jason Terry, was an assistant coach.
A month later, Brown tweeted out an altered photo of himself wearing a Huskies jersey.
“Heart just turned purple,” he said.
Brown wasn’t available to discuss the move or his return to Tucson this week — Washington said a conflict took him off its scheduled Zoom interview session Tuesday — but the numbers won’t argue with his move back to Seattle.
Neither will Washington coach Mike Hopkins, who said he tried to recruit Brown in 2020 only to watch Terry play a role in recruiting Brown to Arizona instead. He didn’t flinch, either, when Brown shot 1 for 11 in that Senior Day game against the Huskies.
“I mean, listen — I’ve seen him up close and personal and you knew how elite he was,” Hopkins said. “He’s scored a lot of points and knows how to do it. It was Senior Night playing against the hometown school and all those different things can play into it.
“Sometimes people have bad games and they have good games. That’s why they call them averages.”
There haven’t really been any bad games for Brown this season, and his averages reflect it. Brown is averaging 22.4 points, 4.4 rebounds and 3.7 assists so for for Washington. He put up 7.3 points per game last season at Arizona.
The resulting honors have started arriving, too. Brown was named to the Crossover Classic all-tournament team last week in South Dakota. And on Monday, he picked up his first Pac-12 Player of the Week award after averaging 23.0 points, 5.3 rebounds and 4.0 assists in the four games Washington split last week.
But so far this season, Brown’s performances have been on an island. The Huskies, who dropped to 4-4 after a home loss to Winthrop on Saturday, don’t have anybody else averaging more than 10.3 points a game, and Hopkins acknowledged a need for balance.
“You want him to go and score when he has opportunities because he can do it,” Hopkins said. “Now it just goes back to the reads and if they defend in different ways, then we’ve got to take advantage somewhere else.
“We’ve just got to keep getting better, but having a guy like Terrell who you can depend on night in and night out to score, make plays, play defense and lead is definitely a luxury.”
Hopkins’ belief is also reflected in another number: After averaging 25.6 minutes per game with the Wildcats last season, Brown averages 37.4 for the Huskies.
Playing on the last stage of his college basketball career, Brown won’t get off it.
“With Terrell, it’s all about mindset and hard work,” Hopkins said. “He’s so determined on being the best he can be and he’s willing to put in the work. That’s why he’s gone from where he started to being one of the elite guards not only in our league but in the country.”
