Greg Hansen: Bennedict Mathurin's unselfish play one reason why Cats could be championship-caliber

En route to an Adia Barnes press conference Wednesday, I came upon a very tall man in a red hoodie posing for a picture outside McKale Center.

It was Bill Walton standing with Bennedict Mathurin. It was a then-and-now picture of college basketball. Walton, the nation’s 1973 and 1974 player of the year, was shoulder-to-shoulder with Mathurin, a sudden but sure contender for the NCAA 2022 player of the year award.

Walton. the Pac-12 Networks analyst for Arizona’s 101-76 victory over Northern Colorado, was pumped and ready to unload information on Bennedict’s back-to-back Pac-12 Player of the Week awards.

And then Mathurin didn’t make a field goal for the game’s first 25 minutes. Figures, doesn’t it? There goes the game’s top storyline.

Northern Colorado coach Steve Smiley arrived at McKale Center determined that Mathurin wouldn’t beat the Bears. He ordered his team to deploy an anybody-but-Bennedict defense that Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd described as “they literally left everybody else open …. (he) was face-guarded all day.”

Smiley implemented the triangle-and-two defense, perhaps the most poisonous words in Arizona basketball history. Remember? At the 1998 Elite Eight, Utah coach Rick Majerus used that gimmick defense to disrupt Arizona’s defending national championship offense in a humbling 76-51, this-game-will-hurt-forever upset.

“They threw something different at us,” said senior guard Justin Kier.

But this time it didn’t work for a lot of reasons, primarily because the Bears weren’t good enough inside to stop Christian Koloko and Azoulas Tubelis, who combined for what seemed like a gazillion points.

It also failed because Mathurin didn’t play with a sense of entitlement. He chipped in. Elite scorers don’t often willingly chip in. Mathurin did.

“Some guys might sulk,” said Kier. “But Benn’s a really good teammate. He was congratulating everybody on the team.”

Mathurin quietly scored 11 points, reaching double figures only after he rebounded his teammate’s missed shots in the final minutes and turned them into two easy put-back buckets.

121721-tuc-spt-hansencol-p2 — Arizona guard Justin Kier was among the players who stepped up when Northern Colorado decided to run a triangle-and-two defense on Bennedict Mathurin.
Mamta Popat, Arizona Daily Star

It was a victory within the victory for Lloyd, Mathurin and Arizona.

When you’ve got a player of Mathurin’s skill, you often have to tiptoe around his ego. But on Wednesday, Mathurin didn’t touch the ball in nine of the final 16 possessions he played.

Yet when he was subbed out with 1:33 remaining, Mathurin smiled to the crowd and raised his palms, as if to ask the 11,943 fans to rise from their seats and cheer for the greater good of the nation’s eighth-ranked team.

It doesn’t always work this way. In the 1999-2000 season, Arizona State’s Eddie House became the first player to be named Pac-10 Player of the Week three times in succession. House was a volume shooter, which is an accurate description only if you turn the volume to its highest level.

House preceeded his historic three-week run by shooting 16 times against BYU — and missing all of them, if that’s possible. ASU lost, but it didn’t stop House.

In the Sun Devils’ next game, against San Diego State, he attempted 29 shots. This time he scored 46 points and was named Pac-10 Player of the Week. After that, you weren’t going to get the ball out of House’s hands.

House attempted 87 shots the next four games. ASU didn’t contend for the Pac-10 title or get invited to the NCAA Tournament that season, but House scored so many points — 157, or 39 per game — in victories over so-so Bucknell, Penn State and Cal and a loss to Stanford that he won two more conference player of the week trophies.

Arizona’s one victory over Illinois, with Mathurin scoring 30, had more meaning than all of those games.

This isn’t to pick on House. He went on to become a second-round draft pick and play 11 NBA seasons. Arizona State now displays his jersey in the school’s arena. But his college teams, the Sun Devils, went 26-46 in conference games and all of those shots didn’t lead to much,.

On Wednesday, Mathurin’s maturity and decision not to attempt to play hero basketball allowed his teammates to experience the role of go-to guys. Mathurin was 0 for 2 afield at halftime, but the rest of his teammates shot 19 for 31, which is 63% — which means it’s almost impossible to lose.

Off-the-bench players Kier, Oumar Ballo and Pelle Larsson combined to outscore the reigning national player of the week 16-2 in the first half. It was a coach’s dream.

Walton loved it. He couldn’t stop crowing to the TV audience about how Mathurin selflessly let the game come to him, rather than try to hijack Lloyd’s offense and, perhaps, mess up the continuity and togetherness that is a big reason the Wildcats are 10-0.

“I want to thank my teammates who fed me (the ball),” said Tubelis, who scored 16 points on just nine shots. “The way this offense is, if I see an open teammate, I just pass him the ball.”

It was a way of saying “thanks, Benn.”

For the previous two weeks, Mathurin was the open man. On Wednesday, he became a passer and a rebounder. He won’t win a third straight player-of-the-week award, but his teammates and coaches will appreciate him even more.

That’s how you win a Pac-12 championship.