The Arizona Wildcats and the Purdue Boilermakers will face off in the Elite Eight tomorrow night with a trip to the Final Four on the line. Let’s not sugarcoat it, Arizona is good. Very good. It’s going to take Purdue’s A game to win this thing. Maybe even an A+ game. It will take a game like Purdue had against Michigan, another team that no one thought Purdue could beat. And yet…
So, with that in mind I reached out to Brian Pedersen from Arizona Desert Swarm part of SB Nation who I’ve worked with in the past on Q&As. We did a Q&A previously when these two teams met in Indianapolis two seasons ago when Arizona was #1 and Purdue was #3. Brian agreed rapidly and we got this all done in about 12 hours. Go over there and say hi, introduce yourself, talk some (polite) trash, and learn more about the Wildcats from their own fans.
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With all the preamble out of the way let’s get into the Q&A!
Arizona has consistently been one of the best if not the best team all season long. How do you explain that consistency night in and night out?
I think it comes down to a combination of the balance it has on offense, the devotion to getting the ball inside and just not having a bad game.
Eight different players have led the team in scoring this season, with seven getting to 20 in a game. Against Arkansas it became the first team in NCAA tourney history to have six score at least 14. And so much of that comes with the offensive approach, which is heavy on the paint and getting to the line.
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It’s a lot harder to have an off night offensively when most of the shots are coming at the rim or the foul line.
Arizona’s two losses on the season came against Kansas and Texas Tech by a combined 7 points and the loss to Texas Tech went into overtime. What was different about those two games if anything?
Kansas was the first and only time this season that the opponent dictated how the game went. The Jayhawks forced the 2-point shots a little further from the rim, and with more jumpers meant less foul pressure. There was also the fact that Kansas just never loses at home on Big Monday.
Texas Tech was the start of the period when Arizona’s rotation got thinned for a few games. Reserve Dwayne Aristode sat out with an illness, then Koa Peat didn’t play the second half because of a lower leg muscle strain that would keep him out three more games. JT Toppin took over on that game, and with only a 6-man rotation Arizona wasn’t equipped to slow him down.
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Arizona hasn’t been challenged too much in March. Utah State has been their most competitive game, but last night they absolutely took it to Arkansas in a rout. Have they ratcheted up their play in March or is this just standard?
There’s been nothing really out of the ordinary so far in the tourney except for maybe how the Wildcats kept adding to the lead against Arkansas. At times Arizona has had a tendency to build a big lead and let up, suddenly finding itself in a much closer game later on. That was the case against Utah State, but as was the case during the regular season it would then come back to its senses and hold on.
There’s been two really good offensive games (Long Island, Arkansas), two excellent defensive games (LIU, Utah State) and one each where it got away with not being top notch on either offense (Utah State) or defense (Arkansas) but it didn’t matter because the other side did its job. Not having a game where both offense and defense struggle is a big reason Arizona is 35-2.
Arizona starts three freshman in Brayden Burries, Koa Peat, and Ivan Kharchenkov is there any fear that they are running into a freshman wall or won’t meet the moment if they face adversity in this Elite Eight matchup (please say yes.)?
If that was going to happen it probably would have a long time ago, and it sort of did for two of them. Peat had his injury absence, which allowed him to get refreshed, and Burries played through an illness that saw him get an IV in the locker room right after the BYU game on Feb. 18.
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Tommy Lloyd keeps saying these aren’t typical freshmen, and that’s more than coach speak. Burries and Peat both won a bunch of championships before coming to Arizona, with Peat earning four gold medals for Team USA including the FIBA U19 World Cup last summer when Lloyd was head coach. And Kharchenkov, who looks 25, was playing in the top tier of the German Bundesliga before coming to college.
What will Arizona be looking to do to win this game? And what will they want to avoid doing?
Arizona scored 60 points in the paint and 30 at the line against Arkansas, and it will always be its first priority to go inside and create foul pressure. Defensively, it will be about preventing easy shots and using its size to control the boards. What the Wildcats will want to avoid is turning it over too much, forcing bad shots that fit into how Purdue defends and overall just straying from the formula. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
A more general question here for our readers who haven’t watched a lot of Arizona this season, what are the strengths and weaknesses (if anything) of this Wildcat squad?
Arizona’s biggest strengths are its balanced scoring, commitment to getting the ball inside on offense, rebounding acumen and a senior point guard in Jaden Bradly who has been dubbed ‘The Closer’ for his ability to come up huge late in close games. On the weakness side, the only flaw that’s seemed to pop up is breaking presses particularly late in games when opponents are desperate to get back into a game.
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A trip to the Final Four is on the line, a place Purdue was two seasons ago and Arizona hasn’t been since 2001. Will that pressure to return to the Final Four play a factor in the outcome here?
We in the media bring that up all the time, and the fan base has 25 years’ worth of ulcers and bloody cuticles to show for it. But none of these players were alive the last time Arizona got to the Final Four, and though there are some guys who were around for the previous two Sweet 16 teams it’s really a brand new squad with no personal knowledge of that disappointment. And Lloyd came from Gonzaga, which for the first 15-plus years of his time as an assistant was in that ‘will they ever make a Final Four?’ pack before getting to the finals in 2017 and 2021.
If you were unable to watch and woke up to see Arizona had lost, what would be your best guess as to how it happened?
Considering the experience Purdue has, with three starters from the 2024 championship game team around, I’d assume it had to do with those guys tapping into that. Or it could have been that Arizona finally had a game where everything went wrong all at once.
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Give me a prediction of what you think will be the outcome including a score.
Arizona began this season by beating defending champion Florida in Las Vegas, then a few weeks later won at UConn, which were champs in 2023 and 2024. Both of those teams had a fair amount of returning talent from those title squads, like Purdue does from its Final Four run. Winning this game feels like the culmination of a seasonlong trend of being able to take on the best of the best and remain standing afterward. The Wildcats end their 25-year FF drought, winning 79-75.
