{"id":118802,"date":"2025-01-29T13:49:52","date_gmt":"2025-01-29T18:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/?p=118802"},"modified":"2025-01-29T13:57:00","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T18:57:00","slug":"how-arizona-turned-season-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/2025\/01\/29\/how-arizona-turned-season-around\/","title":{"rendered":"How Arizona Turned Its Season Around"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Arizona Wildcats started off the basketball season ranked 10th in the nation in the preseason AP poll. However, after a loss on December 14th, the Wildcats were 4-5 overall. Their best win was over Davidson in the first round of the Battle 4 Atlantis. The team looked bad. However, since then, they have completely turned their season around. On December 18th. Arizona throttled a tough Samford team at home. They have since gotten off to a great start to conference play, and currently have an 8-1 record in the Big 12, which is just a half a game behind Houston for first place. This run has included road wins against Cincinnati and West Virginia, as well as a win in an overtime thriller against #3 Iowa State on Monday night. But how did the Wildcats do it? Let’s take a look at this Arizona basketball turnaround.<\/p>\n

How Arizona Turned Its Season Around<\/h2>\n

For starters, Arizona has been significantly better offensively. In those 5 early losses, the Wildcats shot 42.2% from the field. Since then they have shot a much more impressive 49.3% from the field (that increases to 51.1% if you take out the outlier game against Texas Tech). They are now in the top 25 in both adjusted offensive and defensive efficiency, and are now 26th in the nation in scoring offense at 82.8 points per game. Those improvements have been a huge part of this Arizona basketball turnaround.<\/p>\n

Another thing that has been a big benefit for Arizona has been a change to the starting lineup. After starting the first six games, KJ Lewis<\/a> asked to start coming off of the bench. Since then he has been one of the best sixth men in the country. He has especially stepped up against better teams. He had 21 points in the road win over West Virginia, and had 14 points, 8 rebounds, & 6 assists on Monday night against Iowa State.\u00a0 Campbell transfer<\/a> Anthony Dell’Orso<\/a>, who is always a big shooting and scoring threat, has started most of the games since Lewis was moved to the bench. Oakland transfer Trey Townsend<\/a> looked like he just didn’t fit with this team early in the season, but has settled in much more comfortably since then.<\/p>\n

Caleb Love<\/a> has, for the most part, been the same old Caleb Love. He’s either awesome or awful, kind of like the Jameis Winston of college basketball. In three of the four early losses (specifically the losses to Wisconsin, Duke, and UCLA) he was awful. He did not shoot above 30% from the field in any of those games. While he has still been up and down since then, he somehow still shows up when it has really mattered. He was terrible (1-11 from the field) in the first 38 or so minutes of the Iowa State game. Then he hit a three and then another 60+ footer to force overtime. Then, of course, he could not miss in overtime.<\/p>\n

Great Coaching<\/h3>\n

It’s also worth noting how great of a coach Tommy Lloyd continues to be. He has consistently shown that he can make adjustments and win basketball games. Big NCAA Tournament success hasn’t come yet, but it is coming.<\/p>\n

What’s Left<\/h3>\n

This Arizona basketball turnaround has been impressive. The Wildcats have a lot of big games left to really show what they’re made of and prove that they were worthy of all that preseason praise. The Wildcats have a home game against Houston next month after Valentine’s Day. Then they have road trips to Baylor, Iowa State, and Kansas. The last two of which are two of the toughest places to play in the country.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo Credit: \u00a9 Aryanna Frank-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Arizona Wildcats started off the basketball season ranked 10th in the nation in the preseason AP poll. However, after a loss on December 14th, the Wildcats were 4-5 overall. Their best win was over Davidson in the first round of the Battle 4 Atlantis. The team looked bad. However, since then, they have completely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3948,"featured_media":120748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[773,1608],"tags":[2771,846,2980,4547,49278],"class_list":["post-118802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-college-basketball","category-basketball","tag-arizona","tag-arizona-wildcats","tag-big-12-basketball","tag-caleb-love","tag-tommy-lloyd"],"modified_by":"Jacob Stephens, Associate Editor","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3948"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118802"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120754,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118802\/revisions\/120754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}