PHOENIX – As the Arizona men’s basketball team searches for its first Final Four appearance since 2001 and first national championship since 1997, its play suggests this could be the team best built to end the drought.
The Wildcats etched themselves into history Saturday, beating West Virginia 88-53 to join Nebraska and Miami (OH) this season as the first teams to start a season 20-0 since Gonzaga did it in 2020-21.
The Wildcats don’t seem to slip up. They have their moments where the shots won’t fall or turnovers get the best of them, but in the end, they always find their stride.
Five of Arizona’s wins have come against ranked teams, including Florida and UConn, hoisters of the last three national championship trophies. The Wildcats also defeated Auburn and Alabama by 29 and 21, respectively, showcasing dominance against some of the SEC’s best programs in recent memory. Of UA’s 20 wins, only five have been within single digits.
It’s a team expertly built in an era of college athletics where no one seems to have the answer to roster construction. Two freshman phenoms lead the way, anchored by star veterans who have been a part of the program for multiple seasons, a rarity in today’s college basketball landscape.
“They’re playing with a shared purpose,” Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd said in a press conference after the Wildcats beat the Mountaineers. “Our guys have done an incredible job connecting and really coming together.”
That shared purpose was on display Saturday. From the jump, the Wildcats pounced, extending the lead to double digits in a little over seven minutes and never looking back.
A middling team in the Big 12, the Mountaineers have struggled to find consistency. They have shown some signs of promise, beating now-No. 14 Kansas in early January, but against UA, they were outclassed on every level. The Wildcats held the Mountaineers to 34% shooting from the field and 27% from three-point range, while the Wildcats shot an ultra-efficient 53% from the field and 43% from three-point range.
On a Saturday when freshmen across the country took the spotlight with stellar performances like Illinois’ Keaton Wagler’s 46-point performance and Houston’s Kingston Flemings’ 42-point game, freshman guard Brayden Burries added his name to the list, scoring 22 points along with seven assists and zero turnovers.
“He’s a tremendous scorer, uber talented,” senior forward Tobe Awaka said in a press conference. “He shows it in practice and shows it in games.”
The five-star guard brought an immediate impact to a deep UA team this season, but he has really come into his own since early December. Since a Dec. 6 game against Auburn, Burries has averaged 16.7 points per game with a 3.08 assist-to-turnover ratio, maximizing possessions.
“Brayden has amazing instincts for a young basketball player,” Lloyd said. “Now I think he’s layering that with some experience.”
The dominant win elevated UA into the top spot in KenPom and the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) rankings, two computer rankings that play a major factor in NCAA Tournament seeding.
After Houston’s road loss to Texas Tech on Saturday, UA now sits alone atop the Big 12 with a 7-0 conference record. However, as tough as the Big 12 is, the Wildcats haven’t had an arduous conference schedule through their first seven games. As of today’s NET rankings, they’ve already played the only three Big 12 games considered to be Quadrant 3 and have only played a couple of Quadrant 1 games. Only one of the seven teams is projected to make the NCAA Tournament, per Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology.
That switch is going to flip quickly, however. Of the eleven games left on their schedule, the Wildcats will play seven games against top-15 teams, three of which are on the road in some of the most raucous environments in college basketball: Kansas’s Allen Fieldhouse, BYU’s Marriott Center and Houston’s Fertitta Center will be tough places to drown out the noise.
So while the thought of 20 wins rings nicely, freshman forward Koa Peat was adamant about the team’s philosophy of taking games as they come and not looking ahead to tougher opponents.
“We’re just trying to take it one game at a time,” Peat said in a press conference. “I think we’ve been doing a good job of it, getting ready for these games, being prepared.”
The Wildcats’ gauntlet of a schedule begins as they head up the road to face a projected top pick in AJ Dybantsa and the No. 13 BYU Cougars on Monday.
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
