Even Keel: How Arizona Basketball hopes Mental Toughness will Fuel a Championship Run

There’s a moment in every basketball game, every season, really, where the whole thing can come apart. A run by the other team. A cold stretch from the floor. A bad call. A lead that evaporates. In that moment, a team reveals exactly who it is.

I know this from personal experience.

It was 1997. I was a senior at Marcos De Niza High School in Tempe, and we’d scratched and clawed our way to the Arizona state semifinals. We were good. Number one in the state good. We believed we were good. We’d earned the right to be there. Our opponent was Carl Hayden, and we had no business being afraid of them. We’d beaten each other once that season previously and were very familiar. 

Then the runs started coming. Carl Hayden went on one, then another, and somewhere in the middle of the second one, I watched our team fall apart in real time, not physically, but mentally. You could see it on guys’ faces. Shoulders dropped. Eyes went somewhere else. The bench got quiet. We started trying to do too much individually to make up for what we were losing collectively, and that only made it worse. We never recovered. The game slipped away, and so did our season.

I’ve carried that with me for almost thirty years. Not as bitterness, but as a lesson. The team that wins those moments isn’t always the most talented. It’s the one that stays together when the floor drops out from under them. It’s the one that doesn’t get too high or too low. It’s the one that knows a run is just a run, something to weather, not something to fear.

Personally, I always felt like I let my team down by not being the leader it demanded.

Which is exactly why watching this Arizona Wildcats team has felt like therapy.

In Sunday night’s round of 32 matchup with Utah State, the Wildcats squandered an 18-point second half lead down to a measly four points. For most teams in this situation disaster would’ve surely resulted. But not this team. Not this year.

Jaden Bradley, Motiejus Krivas, and Brayden Burries all helped stem the tide and aid Arizona with huge baskets and free throws to overcome adversity, once again.

These Wildcats don’t panic. It’s almost eerie how composed they are, how they absorb momentum swings and keep going like nothing happened. And it’s not an accident. It’s a culture that starts on the bench with Tommy Lloyd, flows through every timeout and every huddle, and has been fully internalized by a group of players that, remarkably, includes four freshmen who are among the best players in the country.

On Sunday, their nerves were tested and they still found a way. That’s who they’ve been all season. A resilient group led by a collage of champions and players with experience that have the goods to go all the way.

When someone asked Lloyd about the calmness he and his staff project on the sideline, the collectiveness that seems to radiate into his players, his answer was disarmingly simple.

“If you want your team to be poised, I think as a coach, you need to be poised. If you want your team to be prepared, you know, you need to be prepared. So for me, I don’t really complicate it. I’m not trying to make them into me, but hopefully just us being steady and not panicking is comfort for the players,” said Lloyd.

The players have absorbed it completely. Ask any of them about handling the ups and downs of a game and a season, and they sound like they’re reading from the same page, not because they’ve been coached to say the right things, but because they’ve genuinely bought in. It’s why they were recruited to Arizona.

“It’s about not getting too high or too low either way,” says senior forward Tobe Awaka, who has become one of the steadiest presences on the roster. “Basketball is a game of runs overall. It’s a game of energy, momentum, stuff like that. So when another team’s making their run, it’s just about sort of controlling it as much as we can, just ensuring that it doesn’t get too big, keeping our composure, sticking to what we do, and just kind of figuring out what’s making them click.”

Arizona has seen adversity of all types this season. Down double digits to the defending national champion? No problem. Facing No.2 Houston in Houston without Koa Peat and Dwayne Aristode while Brayden Burries and Jaden Bradley were both battling an illness? No problem. The list goes on and on.

Peat, who announced himself to the world with 30 points in his college debut against the defending national champion Florida Gators, echoes his teammates with a maturity that belies his age. “Just enjoying the moment, trying to stay even keel, not get too emotionally attached to any situation, and just try to flush it out. If I had a bad game, try to flush it out and just move on to the next one.”

What makes this team remarkable is that the philosophy isn’t theoretical. It’s been tested, repeatedly, at the highest level, and it’s held every single time.

The Wildcats entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 overall seed in the West Region at 32-2, having swept both the Big 12 regular season and tournament titles. They now head to San Jose for a matchup with Arkansas in the Sweet 16 with storylines that you couldn’t possibly make up (See Sean Miller). That record looks clean from the outside. Up close, it’s a story of adversity absorbed and adversity answered.

Consider the Big 12 Championship game against Houston, a program specifically designed to beat you up and break your spirit. Arizona built a 15-point second-half lead. Then Houston went on a 14-0 run. Fourteen to nothing. The lead was gone down to one point, 59-58, with Arizona struggling to get the ball in the basket, Jaden Bradley compromised by a wrist injury, and three key players in serious foul trouble. Real hoopers know you’re in the quicksand at those moments. 

On paper, that’s a nightmare. In practice, for this team, it was just another run.

Brayden Burries ended the drought with an and-1 for a three-point play. Freshman Ivan Kharchenkov, who hadn’t scored in the first half, rang up seven consecutive points to push the lead back to nine. Burries sealed it at the free-throw line. Arizona 79, Houston 74. Big 12 champions.

The thing is, Burries almost didn’t even get to that moment. Earlier in the same game, he had airballed two consecutive three-point attempts. His first made shot didn’t come until the final minutes of the first half. By any reasonable standard, that should have been the kind of start that gets into a player’s head, that makes him tentative, that makes him stop shooting, that changes who he is in that game.

It didn’t.

“I noticed that they started closing out short on me, and I felt like that was a little disrespectful. So that makes you get in your own head a little bit. Coach talked to me. He said, ‘We’re gonna need you to keep shooting.’ And that was the mindset, just, you know you’re gonna be open, you gotta shoot it. The team’s gonna need you to shoot it,” Burries said.

What followed was a 10-0 personal scoring run that swung the momentum of the entire first half. Burries would finish the game with 21 points on 6-of-10 shooting, 7-of-7 from the free-throw line.

Asked whether going through that kind of adversity, from airballs to hero, helps him handle it better the next time it comes, Burries didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. I think that’s just life, honestly. Adversity’s gonna happen, and you show your character when adversity happens, how you deal with it. So I think that was a big part of my basketball career so far, is getting through that.”

He’s 19 years old.

This is why Sunday shouldn’t have been a surprise. To casual fans, they will say the Wildcats almost blew it. To the ones that have scrutinized and analyzed every movement, it shouldn’t be a shock. This is just who they are.

Koa Peat’s season has been its own lesson in mental resilience. After that 30-point debut, a performance that left 16,000 fans breathless, came the inevitable reckoning of a freshman season. There were nights of 2-of-11 from the floor. A lower-leg injury in February that cost him three games. Moments where the expectations and the reality didn’t match up, where the guy who put Florida away in November looked like he was still figuring out who he was.

He was. That’s what a freshman season is.

But through all of it, Peat held to the same compass. “If I had a bad game, try to flush it out and just move on to the next one. Just play my hardest and play how I know I can play.” And on the other side of the ledger, he didn’t coast on the good moments either. “Just trying to pick up teammates whenever I see them down. If Delly misses a shot, I’ma tell him, ‘Next time I hit you, shoot it again.’ If JB’s not being aggressive, I’ma tell JB to be aggressive.”

He also said something that gets at exactly how much Tommy Lloyd’s presence matters to this group. “He’s huge for us and our confidence. He really believes in us with ultra confidence.”

That confidence, Lloyd would tell you, isn’t manufactured. It flows from the same place as his sideline poise, from genuinely believing in the process, in the preparation, in the work done before the game ever tips off. 

There’s a version of this story where the talent is the story. Burries and Peat are projected first-round NBA Draft picks. Tobe Awaka is the Big 12 Sixth Man of the Year. Jaden Bradley is one of the best point guards in college basketball. But talent without mental toughness doesn’t win championship games after you’ve airballed two shots and given up a 14-0 run. Talent alone doesn’t get you through a season. As Wildcat fans, we are all too familiar with that recipe.

What gets you through is exactly what I didn’t have on that court at Marcos De Niza in 1997, staring at the scoreboard as Carl Hayden’s run extended and our composure dissolved. What gets you through is what the Wildcats showed on the court in San Diego Sunday evening. What gets you through is the ability to absorb it, to feel the game going sideways and choose not to spiral, to look at the guy next to you and decide that this particular run, this particular moment, is not bigger than what you’ve built together.

Arizona players said they had some of their best huddles of the season against Utah State. A togetherness that absolutely refused to fail.

Arizona has built something together this season that goes beyond wins and losses. They’ve built an identity. And that identity is steady, composed, unshaken and the reason they’re still playing in March with a chance to win a national championship.

The moments will come again, the runs, the cold stretches, the calls that don’t go your way. Arizona has proven, all season long, that they know what to do when those moments arrive.

They don’t panic. They flush it. They get back on the other end. They keep shooting.

If only someone had told us that in 1997.