Caleb Love scores career-high 36 points as Arizona Wildcats beat Oregon 87-78

EUGENE, Ore. — Whether Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd likes it or not, never losing in back-to-back games at Arizona is now officially a thing.

Maybe a big thing.

Despite losing 83-80 to last-place Oregon State on Thursday night, and walking into a building where they had lost six straight games Saturday, the Wildcats went out and led wire-to-wire in an 87-78 win over Oregon.

Caleb Love led the way offensively for Arizona with a career-high 36 points, tying the Matthew Knight Arena single-game scoring record, while the Wildcats led by up to 14 points in the first half and 16 in the second.

They never really had to sweat it.

"After taking the L, you come in the next game with kind of more of a fire," said guard Kylan Boswell, who chipped in 14 points and three assists. "You don't want to take back-to-back Ls. We're trying to keep that streak for Coach Lloyd for sure."

Arizona has still never lost in the next game after any of its 16 losses under Lloyd since he took over before the 2021-22 season. The Wildcats now have the longest active streak in college basketball for most games (95) without back-to-back losses, a string that dates back to late in Sean Miller’s final UA season of 2020-21.

Not that Lloyd will make much of it.

“You know what I want to do?” Lloyd said. “I want to win back-to-back and then I want to win back-to-back-to-back. So I don't even think about that.”

Arizona also kept up a trend of almost never getting swept in Oregon, something that’s happened only once since 2005-06, even though that looked like a difficult task for the Wildcats entering Saturday’s game. They had struggled to contain the Beavers’ offense on Thursday and on Saturday were facing a team that beat them by 19 points last season.

But on Saturday, UA shot 49.1% from the field, hit 10 of 19 3-pointers and scored 17 points off Oregon’s 14 turnovers to pull into a first-place tie with the Ducks. Both teams are tied at 6-3 in conference play, while Arizona is 15-5 overall and Oregon is 14-6.

"Our decision-making was better," Tommy Lloyd said. "I just felt overall we were we were in control of what we wanted to do... on both ends of the floor. I thought we really mature with handling and managing the game."

Maybe no more so than after Oregon carried some potential momentum into the second half.

En route to 20 first-half points, the third time he’d had 20 in a half this season, Love dunked to give Arizona a 45-31 lead with 1:09 left in the first half. But UA’s Keshad Johnson was called for a technical foul, appearently for his head-tapping gesture, a way of players celebrating when an opponent is dunked on.

"It'd be nice if these kids could express themselves a little bit and I didn't think there was anything blatant or anybody in somebody's face," Lloyd said. "But the refs have a job to do. Scott (Brown) is a good ref and he called it how he thought it was supposed to be called. So we'll roll with it."

Keeshawn Barthelemy hit both ensuing technical free throws and Oregon center N’Faly Dante scored on a hook to cut UA’s lead to just 10 with 42 secons left.

Then, after Oregon guard Jermaine Couisnard blocked a shot from UA’s KJ Evans and Jaden Bradley missed a jumper on another Wildcat possession, Couisnard fired in a three-quarter-court shot that went through the net as the buzzer sounded.

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The halftime score was 45-38 and, if Couisnard’s shot wasn’t chilling enough for the Wildcats by itself, there was also this: He scored 27 points in the Ducks’ blowout win over Arizona a year earlier in the same building.

But the Wildcats remained unfazed. Just 12 seconds into the second half, Love drove inside for a floater, and Arizona led by 11 after center Oumar Ballo scored 46 seconnds after that.

“It was nice that we had the first possession and I think Caleb made a nice controlled shot,” Love said. “I just felt like the ball was in the right guys' hands today and, with good pace, we were pretty methodical in how we wanted to approach things. We got to the things that are effective for us.”

Couisnard went on to score 20 points to lead the Ducks, who still trailed by 10 points or more throughout the final 14 minutes.

Love scored his 36 points on 12-for-18 shooting, breaking a Matthew Knight Arena scoring record in the process. He grinned when an Oregon-based reporter told him of the record afterward.

"Yeah," Love said. "I coulda had more, too, but it's all good."

Love credited his teammates and point guard Kylan Boswell, who was standing next to him during a postgame interview, for setting him up for his big afternoon.

"I really just played within the offense with my teammates and let them create the shots for me," Love said. "We've got our PG here (Boswell) and we play off him. So when he plays good, we all play good."

While Boswell added 14 points and three assists for the Wildcats, Johnson had 12 points and four rebounds while hitting 3 of 4 3-pointers.

The Wildcats' overall efficiency made them look more like the team that started the season 8-0 with a win at Duke than one that entered Saturday losing three road games in a row, including their Thursday night embarrassment up the road in Corvallis.

"You hope there's a response but at the end of the day, you have to be a mature enough competitor thatyou're not going on emotional ups and downs of play bad, respond, play good," Lloyd said. "You want that response when you play bad. But ultimately I want us to be more consistent."

Photos: No. 9 Arizona Wildcats win at Oregon 87-78, Pac-12 men's college basketball