When is an 88-80 win in a Big 12 Conference game not enough?
Well, when Tommy Lloyd says so. And he said so on Saturday night. Emphatically, in fact. No Tommy Lloyd press conference has been like it. It was pointed and passionate – if only in Tommy Lloyd’s way.
And it wasn’t about the margin of victory but about the style points his team showed in its win over UCF in McKale Center in moving to 10-5 overall and 4-0 in the conference.
After all, he said, “I’m fighting for our season, point blank, right? I mean, you guys (in the media) have been all the ones knowing how we’ve been playing. You guys are making all the comments. But you know what, I’m behind the curtain. I’m fighting. I’m fighting for these guys. I’m fighting for our team, and I’m not going to sugar coat it. You know what? I haven’t been sugar coating it with them. If you think I’m telling you stuff right now that they haven’t heard you’re crazy. They know. They know where we’re at, and they know where we want to go, and if we want to go, where we want to go, we’ve got to get better.”
Still, he was so upset – even for Tommy who doesn’t look upset when he says it – he used a curse word. That’s when you know he was speaking from the heart.
Even when I asked about a positive – the balanced scoring – he wanted no part of it.
Balance? You’re talking balance? For all intent and purpose, he might as well have said that.
“I’m upset with how dumb we played,” he said. “We were dumb. Our fundamentals were poor. Our late-game execution was poor, and it’s not acceptable. Hey, I love the result, and I told the staff and the players, if somebody would’ve told me when we got back to Tucson after the UCLA debacle, that we’d be 4-0 in conference, I probably wouldn’t believe you. So, I love where we’re at, but I’m also going to fight for where we’re going, and Arizona basketball does not play dumb at the end of the game. We just weren’t good enough at the end of the game.”
He continued …
“Whether it’s disrespecting the game or getting casual, whatever you want to call it, we’ve got to be better. Those guys that are playing heavy minutes, they’ve got to be better. At the end of the game, they have to be better. There’s no other way to put it. I could try to put them in better positions, and maybe the best position might be off the court. So, you know, those are conversations we’re going to have. Winning is important and we need to value those opportunities.”
Lloyd said he knew UCF wouldn’t be easy – they “are a tough out” – but UA could have handled it better, he said. Now, is not the time to dawdle.
It’ll only get tougher. Lloyd knows that. The players know that, particularly in the next practice where UA needs to figure out how UCF had 20 offensive rebounds and “they kicked our ass,” Lloyd said.
It only means this:
“Lots of rebounding drills, boxing out drills,” said Tobe Awaka, when asked what will the next practice look like given Lloyd’s disappointment. “We’ll watch film first and translate it to practice and stuff like that. Coach is a great coach. He knows what it takes to win, so he’s gonna hold us to a high standard.”
That’s what his rant was all about, adding he loves it when his team wins and has so much to get on them about.
Arizona’s ability to get out to a 14-point lead in the first half didn’t help – in a weird way. It showed Arizona could get out and jump on a team and put it on … then not.
It’s the “then not” that frustrated Lloyd, who has seen his team dawdle too many times this season, allowing for opponents to stay close and win or make it interesting.
“When we’ve struggled this year, we haven’t made the best play for the team,” he said. “When we’ve been good, we’ve made the best play for the team. It’s not complicated. That’s things all across the board.”
He’s not expecting a 14-point lead to be a 20-point lead or a 25-point lead, his team just needs “to be better.”
It might be being nonchalant “maybe a little selfish,” he said. “(The players thinking) hey we are up maybe it’s a good opportunity for me to do something. We don’t need to be a Me program, we need to be an Us program.”
The players got the message. Or at least they understood it.
“You can kind of nitpick everything, (what) we should have done and we shouldn’t have done after the fact, but in the moment … everyone’s trying hard,” said Anthony Dell’Orso. “Just sometimes you don’t make the best decision in terms of what’s best for the team and not best for individual play. We kind of fell back to that. Early in the season, we were doing that a lot, and then when they came back from the 14-point deficit, that’s kind of what we’re doing. Then we kind of got out of that, we acknowledged our mistakes, and then you can see how fast we got back the lead. It’s just a team thing and accountability thing. No one’s taking things personally, and so soon as we saw that, we just changed.”
Lloyd said the players need to be “mature competitors” and that they are in a tough conference and every game matters.
And it matters now.
“It’s about the team,” he said. “It’s great to be 4-0 but we could be 4-16 if you don’t handle it the right way. We’ve got to handle it the right way.”
Eventually, he did get to a positive or two. Five players scored in double figures, which goes to that balance.
Caleb Love had a team-high 16 points. Dell’Orso added 15, Awaka had 11 points, KJ Lewis had 10 and Henri Veesaar had 14.
The combination of Veesaar and Awaka at the center position went 10 for 15 for 25 points combined.
That’s pretty stout.
“They’re really coming together,” Lloyd said. “It’s a combination, and that’s how I really look at it’s like a collective of you got these four guys playing. Two guys playing the four (power forward), two guys playing the five (center), and they’re being really productive. That’s always been an advantage for us, and it might not be one guy getting all the glory. It might be a group.”
