Your honor, the defense never rests.
Well, it didn’t on Wednesday night against Cincinnati in a game that resembled – in part – a Big 12 football game given its physicalness. Such will be the case the rest of the way? (Read more later)
Top-ranked Arizona prevailed 77-51 in a game that looked close for about 30 minutes before Arizona strangled the Bearcats in the final 10 minutes. Arizona outscored Cincy 37-13 in the final minutes to make it an eventual rout. UA is now 19-0.
“That was not one of our better offensive nights,” Cincinnati coach Wes Miller said.
Cincy hit just 30.4 percent of its shots. Good shots didn’t fall; bad shots didn’t fall. The Bearcats were aggressive, but it didn’t matter. UA’s defense was just too much.
Or was it?
Miller said it was a “cause and effect thing” and “it would be total unfair to say Arizona’s defense isn’t good … their defense is very good.”
So, I went there. Is it underrated given Arizona is more known for its scoring and not the defense?
“I would say so,” said UA’s Evan Kharchenkov. “We want to be known as a good defensive team, and I think we’re showing it most of the game, most of the time.”
Same question, Tommy Lloyd.
“I’ll be honest with you, I have really no opinion on that,” Lloyd said when I asked. “If someone’s choosing to overlook it, I’m honestly, probably not paying attention to him. I don’t get caught up in the analytics. I focus on possession by possession. I thought overall, our defense was pretty good. We had to make some adjustments. I thought some of their personnel, I thought we weren’t as strong on some tendencies as we could have been. I just look at it from that lens. I don’t know what the numbers are saying where we’re at defensively right now, but to hold a Big 12 team to 51 points at home. We haven’t done that very often, so our guys deserve a lot of credit.”
As they should, but to Cincinnati’s credit – or demise – it limits possessions to keep the score under around 60-65. It couldn’t hold Arizona to it. And Cincy had too many turnovers (14) and was killed in the paint (48-14).
“You got to be relentless,” Lloyd said about the play in the paint. “You got to be relentless in your pursuit of that. If you need a little resistance and you can’t push through it, well you’re probably not going to be a good team, so you have to have some wherewithal.”
Lloyd said the game called for being more aggressive – and his team was.
“We appreciate competition,” he said. “We appreciate having to be able to figure things out, because that’s reality.”
And the reality of it all, it’s Big 12 basketball, where being physical is a requisite but isn’t always there. Arizona is finding out it will be more moving forward. Arizona State tried to be very physical with UA, and it worked … until it didn’t. Cincinnati did it too, until it didn’t.
“I think to win these games down the stretch of a conference season, they become physical battles,” Lloyd said. “From my experience, the refs start calling ticky tack stuff. We’re kind of past that stage of the season, so you gotta buckle up, and you gotta be here for it. You gotta play through some physical contact.”
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