Arizona Wildcats have been in good hands when Jemarl Baker runs the show

STANFORD, Calif. — When the ball finally slipped out of Jemarl Baker’s hands and into those of Cal’s Austin Kelly last Thursday, demand for a replay might have been warranted.

Jemarl Baker turned the ball over?

Really?

“I mean, it happens,” Baker said, smiling, after the Wildcats completed another Bay Area sweep by beating Stanford 69-60 on Saturday. “It happens to everybody. So I try to eliminate mistakes as much as I can.”

For the most part he has.

Baker went 153 straight minutes without a turnover until Thursday and, even after committing two more turnovers on Saturday, Baker still has just 14 turnovers to 61 assists.

That’s a 4.4-1 assist-turnover ratio that would be good enough to qualify for the No. 1 spot in college basketball if he met the NCAA minimum (as it is, Iowa’s Connor McCaffrey leads the country at 3.96-1, with 91 assists and 23 turnovers).

The ironic thing about Baker’s weekend is, while he had a combined three turnovers with just four assists in the Wildcats’ two wins, his play overall might have been as helpful to Arizona as ever.

Because unlike how the Wildcats melted down at ASU on Jan. 25 when starting point guard Nico Mannion ran into foul trouble, they were just fine Saturday when Mannion had the same problem.

Arizona Stanford Basketball — UA built its lead in the second half when Jemarl Baker, right, played 13 straight minutes as Nico Mannion battled foul trouble.
Ben Margot

At ASU, Mannion picked up his second foul with six minutes left in the first half and sat until halftime. That didn’t seem like a problem at the time for the Wildcats, who were up by 19 at that point and soon after took a 22-point lead on a 3-pointer from Dylan Smith. But ASU cut Arizona’s lead to 13 at halftime.

In the second half, Mannion picked up his fourth foul with 10 minutes left and UA leading by two — but when he returned with 4:18 to go, the Sun Devils had just taken their first lead of the second half, 60-59.

So during those 11 combined minutes Mannion sat because of foul trouble, the Sun Devils outscored UA by nine.

On Saturday, the opposite happened. UA was leading 44-38 when Mannion picked up his fourth foul on the offensive end with 11:42 left in the game – and the Wildcats had added five more points to their advantage, 63-52, by the time he returned seven minutes later.

Baker didn’t have an assist in that period, but the Wildcats were hitting on all cylinders offensively: Zeke Nnaji went to the line four times, Josh Green stole the ball and dunked it, Dylan Smith hit a 3 and Stone Gettings scored inside.

En route to a career-high 28 minutes, Baker played a total of nearly 13 minutes straight before and during Mannion’s second-half absence.

No panic. No worries.

“A lot of times when that starting point guard goes out with four fouls, the game changes,” UA coach Sean Miller said. “Jemarl was a steadying force and played some really good basketball throughout the second half. … that’s a credit to Jemarl and I think it says a lot about the team.”

Nnaji earns nomination

After scoring 21 points against both Cal and Stanford while averaging eight rebounds, Nnaji was UA’s nominee for the Pac-12 Player of the Week award.

The scoring and rebounding numbers don’t tell the whole story themselves, either. Nnaji actually worked his way to the free-throw line 12 times, then made nine of the ensuing 12 free throws, while fighting through Stanford’s aggressive post defense all night.

“He was outstanding,” Miller said. “They post-trapped every catch he made and for him to finish this game with the points and rebounds that he had, it was a great, great performance.”

Arizona wound up taking advantage of Stanford’s emphasis on trapping Nnaji and other UA post players, grabbing 13 offensive rebounds from the preoccupied Cardinal defense and scoring 10 second-chance points on them.

“Stanford does it to every team,” Miller said. “Their trap is more pronounced. They trapped everybody. They trapped Ira (Lee). They trapped Stone (Gettings) and sometimes the weakness of doing that is you give up second shots. So for us getting 13 second shots is a big deal.

“Part of why we did that is that is their post trapping, but you have to get the ball inside first for them to post trap and in the second half, we did a good job of that.”

The two road wins could help his case to win the Pac-12 Player of the Week award, but no Arizona player yet this season has won it over 14 weeks. Nnaji has won three Freshman of the Week awards, however.

Green sees big picture

While Smith appeared to pull out of his shooting slump this weekend by hitting a combined 6 for 13 from 3-point territory — though just 2 of 8 at Stanford — Josh Green was a combined 1 of 5 from beyond the arc. His 3-point percentage is now 26.7% in Pac-12 play.

But Green also managed to grab six rebounds in each game, and hit all eight free throws he took at Stanford.

Over both games, Green had four total assists to three turnovers, three steals and a block.His self-fueled transition game was in effect Saturday, too, when he turned a steal into a coast-to-coast dunk that gave UA a 56-48 lead when the Wildcats took control late in the second half.

“You don’t have to score the ball every night and that’s the thing for me, Nico and Zeke,” Green said.

“With Zeke, obviously we get the ball inside a lot because he’s a lot bigger than everybody else. As far as scoring goes, I do what I can do, but at the same time, I don’t need to overdo it or anything. I know my role on the team. I know that I make it up in a lot of other areas.”

Bay Area broomstick

Not only was Arizona’s win Saturday its 20th straight against Stanford overall, but it also marked the fourth straight year the Wildcats have swept the Bay Area swing.

UA is the only Pac-12 team to have swept two weekend road trips so far this season, at Washington/WSU and Cal/Stanford.

“A road sweep in the Pac-12 is coveted,” Miller said. “I think every team and every group of guys who does it, you realize that when you do it how hard it is.”