Forty years from now, the UA basketball community will surely recall Caleb Love’s 60-foot buzzer-beater to ultimately overcome No. 3 Iowa State in overtime. It was theatrical. It will be historical.
Caleb Love’s 60-foot buzzer-beater over No. 3 Iowa State on Jan. 27, 2025, will go down in Arizona basketball history.
But at No. 1, I would vote for Craig McMillan’s 1986 “McClutch’’ shot to beat Pac-10 powerhouse Oregon State 63-62 at the buzzer (on a 94-foot in-bounds pass from Steve Kerr, no less). The Beavers were the ranking Pac-10 basketball kingpin from 1980-85, having been ranked in the AP Top 10 six consecutive seasons, believe it or not.
McMillan’s shot signaled a change in power in the Pac-10; Lute Olson won his first league title two months later. Love’s 60-footer has not yet gathered historical perspective. The McKale Center crowd rushed the court that night in 1986, one of the three court-stormings since McKale was built.
On the opposite side (in regular-season games), I would say USC’s Adam Spanich made the most damaging buzzer-beating shot from long distance to beat Arizona, March, 5, 1998, at the old LA Sports Arena.
Spanich’s 35-footer at the buzzer gave an awful USC team on a seven-game losing streak a stunning 91-90 victory over No. 3 Arizona, which had won 19 consecutive games. It squashed Arizona’s chance to become the only team in league history to finish 18-0 in conference games. The Wildcats won at UCLA two days later to finish the conference season 17-1.
