LAS VEGAS
Rondae Hollis-Jefferson spread a towel over his bare feet and warned an advancing group of reporters not to step on him.
“Watch the toes,” he said.
Everybody shuffled backward.
This is Arizona’s Enforcer, with a capital E, and the only people to take any liberties with him have been opposing Pac-12 coaches, who, in a fit of basketball insanity, did not vote Hollis-Jefferson as the league’s Defensive Player of the Year.
“I was kinda shocked,” he said Thursday. “I didn’t believe it.”
On Thursday, when Arizona began the Pac-12 tournament, the Wildcats filled the tank with a special grade of Rondae Unleaded, smothering Cal 73-51. He was here, there and everywhere.
“He’s the Energizer Bunny,” said UA forward Brandon Ashley. “He gets us all really locked in.”
He was a one-man dunk contest.
Someone was going to pay for the sins of the coaches, who chose Oregon State’s Gary Payton II as the Defensive Player of the Year. That someone was Cal, and RHJ wasn’t shy to acknowledge it.
“I definitely had an edge,” he said.
You take what you can get when the calendar flips to mid-March, and Arizona coach Sean Miller didn’t need to pull out one of his win-one-for-the-Gipper speeches to beat the Bears. All he needed was to make sure his team wasn’t flat in what, on paper, looked to be a walkover game.
Daisy Duck could have motivated the Wildcats on Thursday.
Here’s how effective Arizona was: The Bears scored an average of .692 points per possession. That’s absurd. The Wildcats are No. 3 nationally, yielding their opponents .863 points per possession.
But on Thursday, they were a Steel Curtain.
“We held them to 51 points,” said Miller. “They shot 34 percent from the floor.”
What else was there to say?
In the final box score, Hollis-Jefferson wasn’t much different than he is on most nights. He scored a modest 10 points (he averages 11.2). He grabbed six rebounds (he averages 6.5). He had two steals and two blocked shots. But he had so many hustle plays, so many stops, that no one thought to halt the game, or make mention of it when he joined Arizona’s 700 Club early in the second half.
That’s because no one has been known to keep track of RHJ’s points. He now has 703, which is more than 500 shy of even Ivan Radenovic, but it seems as if all 703 of RHJ’s points have really meant something.
On Thursday, for example, leading 46-32, Hollis-Jefferson chose not to, ahem, conserve energy for Friday’s UCLA semifinal game, sprinting from foul line to foul line in pursuit of a loose ball. Maybe you don’t chase that ball in January or mid-February, but in March, you run until you can’t run any more.
Hollis-Jefferson was breathing so heavily that Miller took him out. By the time Hollis-Jefferson sat on the bench, he looked as if he had just completed a 3,000-meter steeplechase, which is what he often does during a game (minus the water barriers).
If you’re worried about any of the Wildcats pacing themselves, don’t.
“In AAU ball,” said Ashley, “we played three games in three days.”
Hollis-Jefferson was energized for a lot of reasons. One, that’s the way he always plays. Two, he had some payback in mind. Three, the MGM Grand Garden Arena was populated by NBA scouts and coaches, including Atlanta Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer, who sandwiched a trip from Denver to Phoenix by hustling to Las Vegas to see Hollis-Jefferson up close.
The players will never talk about it publicly, but this stage of the season is Money Time for them as much as it is Winning One For the Old Home Team. If Hollis-Jefferson is as good in March as he was a year ago, he may add a comma to his starting NBA salary.
During Arizona’s 2014 NCAA tournament run — games against Weber State, San Diego State, Gonzaga and Wisconsin — Hollis-Jefferson simultaneously put himself and his team on the most-tracked radar. He averaged 16 points, shot 67 percent from the field, made 20 of 23 free throws and played such in-your-face defense that people began to compare him to former UNLV lock-down specialist Stacey Augmon.
“Rondae does everything for us,” Miller said Thursday. “I thought a couple of times in transition he really ignited the action. And from a versatility perspective, he’s maybe as versatile as any player in college basketball.”
Few potential first-round draft picks have bought into the team-first concept more than Hollis-Jefferson. He is averaging only 6.9 shots per game. Compare that to OSU’s Payton, a noted non-shooter, who nonetheless has taken 113 more shots than Hollis-Jefferson this year.
If there is one thing that could have fractured the Wildcats this season, it would have been Hollis-Jefferson trying to prove that he can hit a jumper in a crowd, or trying to show that he’s got range to 20 feet.
Instead, he has chosen to man-up, play defense, hit the boards and, without giving ground, step on the other guy’s toe.
