How to Watch, Game Preview, and Game Thread: #8 Arizona Wildcats at #4 UCLA Bruins

Mar 5

Jaime Jaquez, Jr. will be one of the seniors honored tonight during pre-game Senior Night festivities. (Photo Credit: Don Liebig/uclabruins.com)

At the beginning of this season, I’m sure everyone circled this game on the calendar. UCLA. Arizona. Last game of the regular season. At Pauley Pavilion. Potentially with the conference race hanging in the balance. So, it is a bit of a letdown that Arizona could not hold up its end of the deal. Certainly, UCLA did, as they’ve only lost twice in conference, but Arizona has been a bit more inconsistent and created a situation where the Bruins had already clinched the conference title race before the final week even began.

That doesn’t mean this game is now devoid of energy.

Come on, who are we kidding?

Even with the conference title race over, this is still UCLA versus Arizona. Emotions were going to be running high no matter what.

The last time these two teams faced off, Arizona was able to hold off a late rally by the Bruins to win 58-52 in Tuscon. If you’re a UCLA fan, you can boil that game down to “boy, UCLA really did not want to hit a single open look all game, huh?” Look all over the box score and you see things that look like pure anomalies. For example, the Bruins shot 31.3% from the field in the entire game, which is, by far, their worst mark of the year (even their two games against Southern Cal, which both featured the Bruins refusing to make shots for an entire half, featured a better field goal percentage). Jaime Jaquez, Jr. went 5-17 from the field, Tyger Campbell was 5-18, and Jaylen Clark was 4-13. David Singleton was starting and did not score a single point. The Bruins had 18 offensive rebounds but only nine 2nd-chance points. Even a month removed from that game, it still doesn’t make a ton of sense.

But things have changed for the Bruins.

For one, Amari Bailey is back in the lineup and, while he’s yet to unlock a high level of play at a consistent level, his return does fix the rotation by moving Singleton back to the bench, and Bailey has played excellent defense since his return. For another, Jaime Jaquez came out of that stretch of play a changed man, taking what had once looked like an easy case for conference player of the year and turning it on its head. Since that Arizona game, Jaquez is averaging almost 20 points per game and has shot at least 40% in all but one game in that stretch. His rise in play has coincided with a more focused UCLA that now finds itself fighting for a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament.

Things have also changed for Arizona, but not necessarily for the better. Yes, they’ve still been an excellent offensive team, but they’ve proven to be weirdly inconsistent and their defense has proven to be an average unit. Arizona lost games to Stanford and Arizona State, in part, due to some comically bad defense allowing both teams to generate open looks seemingly at will, and even an inept team like UC Berkeley was able to shoot almost 42% against them. The Arizona strategy down the stretch has been very simple: they’re going to try and outscore you, plain and simple.

Maybe more surprisingly, Arizona’s players have been inconsistent during this period as well. They’ve won most of their games because this conference is not very good, but a neutral observer probably does not feel good about them at the moment. It starts with Azoulas Tubelis, Arizona’s representative in the Player of the Year race, who looked to have that race wrapped up at the beginning of February, but had a nightmare month punctuated by the Arizona State loss when head coach Tommy Lloyd chose to bench Tubelis at the end of the game due to his poor defense. Tubelis seemed to get back on the right track offensively against Southern Cal on Thursday, but that seemed to be the Wildcats’ plan from the jump as he was fed the ball repeatedly. I think Jaquez has essentially wrapped up the POTY race with his February performance and the fact that the Bruins won the conference handily, but this will be Tubelis’ last chance at swaying the voters. So, you can imagine he’ll come out firing.

Also likely to come out firing will be Kerr Kriisa. Kriisa remains the same frustrating player he’s always been, with a solid ability as a distributor but an infuriating capacity to hunt for his own shot on the outside. The game plan against the Wildcats has always been to try and goad him into taking a lot of three-point attempts, because despite the fact that he makes them at a healthy clip (37.6% on the season), a game where Kriisa is shooting a lot of threes is often not one that Arizona wins. Much like Tubelis, I expect Kriisa to come prepared for this game, but not because he’s playing for any recognition, but rather to wipe away the memory of his last game at Pauley Pavilion, a miserable game where Kriisa went 0-11 from the field, 0-9 from three, and had to endure the cheers of the UCLA faithful every time he touched the ball.

The rest of the Wildcats are what they are at this point. Courtney Ramey is perhaps the Wildcat to watch out for the most here, as he possesses an ability to take over games that most of the others don’t possess. He’s capable of big scoring nights, such as the 26-point show he put on against Stanford where he was seemingly the only Wildcat who cared about the game, and he’s usually good about not shooting the ball too much if his shot isn’t falling. Oumar Ballo dominated UCLA in the last matchup during the first half, but his poor second half precipitated a drop-off in his production. After scoring double-digit points in every game leading into and including the first UCLA meeting, Ballo has only accomplished that in five of the 10 games since, with Arizona seemingly moving away from him offensively since that game. Cedric Henderson was inserted into the starting lineup during the week of the last matchup, and he’s carried himself well, but it’s only in the last six games that he’s seen his minutes increase by a noticeable amount. Similarly, that happens to represent the timeframe where Arizona began to struggle again.

Tommy Lloyd employs a short rotation, which means we’ll see a lot of their two main bench pieces, but it represents a weakness that has started to rear its head regarding fitness. Pelle Larsson was moved out of the starting lineup to make way for Henderson, though Larsson still finds himself on the court at the end of games. Larsson has maybe been Arizona’s best player in the past month, being much more consistent on the offensive end (while still being bad defensively). Kylan Boswell is Arizona’s youngest player, being only 17, and while he has held up well considering his age and the length of the season, Arizona does not ask him to do much or carry the load offensively. His 14 points against Southern Cal represented just the third time he’s scored double-digit points this year and was one shy of his career high.

I think there’s going to be a question about what kind of mental state Arizona is going to be in going into this game. The loss to Arizona State not only removed their slim chance at winning the conference but also seemingly removed them from contention for a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. They desperately needed a split of the LA road trip just to stabilize heading into the tournament, and they got a strong win over Southern Cal on Thursday, so we could potentially see Tommy Lloyd’s squad take a tactical retreat in a game where they could get run over by an emotional UCLA squad. Considering how short their bench is, and with at least two games in a row coming up in the Pac-12 Tournament next week, it would not surprise me to see Lloyd call things off early if it looks like the Bruins are going to run away with things just to save their legs for the NCAA Tournament. That might annoy Arizona fans, but it would be one of the smarter decisions Lloyd has made in recent weeks.

The key to this game for the Bruins may be to manage their emotions. It’s certainly going to be an emotional night for many of them - Jaime Jaquez, David Singleton, and (potentially) Tyger Campbell will be playing their final home game at Pauley Pavilion, and we don’t know about the status of guys like Jaylen Clark, Amari Bailey, and Adem Bona for next year. The game has been sold out for over a month, and the arena will be rocking well before tip-off. That’s a lot for the Bruins to process in a short amount of time, especially because they have not had many opportunities to experience this kind of atmosphere this year. The closest they’ve gotten at home is the Southern Cal game, where the Bruins rode that emotion to a large halftime lead, but suffered a letdown in the second half and had to hold on for a victory. If you look back at that last meeting, UCLA still did so many things right, but just did not hit their shots. I don’t see that being a problem in the rematch.

The game lacks the stakes that it once had before the season, but this is still a big game. As a certain famous redhead is prone to saying: “the fate of the known world hangs in the balance.”

(And hey, since I can just do what I want in these things in an attempt to see who reads them. Everyone should go buy some UCLA gear from Homefield Apparel. They just added to their UCLA collection with some limited-time items (though the joggers are already sold out, sorry suckers), and I can vouch for how good the quality is as they’ve basically become my entire wardrobe. I wore this sweet Pauley Pavilion shirt on Thursday underneath this solid UCLA hoodie, and I will likely be wearing Joe Bruin tonight. And you know they do their research when the company also puts out this article tracing the lineage of UCLA’s mascots! Is this all an excuse to link that article? Absolutely!)

Listen to the Game With TMB

Tonight’s game will be on ESPN with Roxy Bernstein and Bill Walton. If you prefer, you can listen to Josh Lewin and Tracy Murray. Just be sure to right-click on it so that you can open up another tab and have it going while you chat in the comments below. Listen to tonight’s game online.

This is your UCLA men’s basketball vs. Arizona Wildcats game thread. Here’s how to watch tonight’s game:

#4 UCLA Basketball (26-4, 17-2)

Opponent: #8 Arizona Wildcats (25-5, 14-5)
Series Record: UCLA leads, 62-47
When: 7:00 pm PT, Saturday, March 4, 2023
Where: Pauley Pavilion, Los Angeles, CA
TV: ESPN with Roxy Bernstein and Bill Walton
Live Stream: WatchESPN.com and the ESPN App
Radio/Audio:
Local Radio: AM 570 with Josh Lewin and Tracy Murray
Online: uclabruins.com
Live Stats: UCLA StatBroadcast
Game Notes:
UCLA
Arizona

Go Bruins!!!

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