After Arizona beat ASU Saturday to improve to its best start in program history, Tommy Lloyd was asked on national television to reflect on what it means to carry on the legacy Lute Olson built in Tucson.<\/p>\n
The question, delivered by former Auburn coach Bruce Pearl on the TNT postgame show, didn\u2019t make mention of Lloyd\u2019s predecessor, Sean Miller, but Lloyd wasn\u2019t going to exalt the history of Arizona basketball without mentioning the guy who last led the Wildcats to enormous success for more than a decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cSean did a great job here,\u201d Lloyd said. \u201cTucson\u2019s a basketball crazy place, and I inherited a program that had really strong bones.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Lloyd was correct to give credit where it\u2019s due, it was also somewhat fitting he would bring up Miller\u2019s significance on the same day that Arizona set a record for longest unbeaten start to a season, surpassing the 2013-14 team that started 21-0.<\/p>\n
By explicitly praising the work of his predecessor, Miller, Lloyd bridged the gap between a decade of \u2018what ifs\u2019 and a present that looks statistically impenetrable. The Wildcats aren\u2019t just winning; they are looking to finish the build that started long ago.<\/p>\n
For a dozen years, Wildcats followers haven\u2019t quite been able to move on from the loss that upended the perfect start to the 2013-14 season. The loss at Cal, and particularly the foot injury to Brandon Ashley, still comes up regularly in conversations.<\/p>\n
Leading up to that game at Haas Pavilion, it felt like Arizona basketball was on a trajectory the program hadn\u2019t experienced in nearly a decade.<\/p>\n
The UA was ranked No. 1 for eight straight weeks, the program\u2019s longest-ever run atop the Associated Press poll until now.<\/p>\n
Miller was bringing in the kind of talent only schools like Duke, Kentucky or Kansas seemed to consistently attract. One year it would be Aaron Gordon and Nick Johnson, Stanley Johnson and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson the next.<\/p>\n
After 10 years of anxiously hoping this would be the team to re-assert Arizona\u2019s as an elite program, Miller had done it. Arizona\u2019s trajectory was the sky.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t all come crashing down that night in Berkeley. Arizona went on to win the Pac-12 regular season title, earn a No. 1 seed and come within a possession of making the Final Four.<\/p>\n
However, under Miller Arizona never again did achieve the prominence that looked so promising through the first three months of that season. The program and its fans instead were marred by hypotheticals for seasons to come.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a dozen years later, and Arizona basketball is once again the talk of the town.<\/p>\n
This time around, though, the program\u2019s place near the top of the sport feels like it\u2019s on solid footing.<\/p>\n
Some figures to consider:<\/p>\n
At 22-0, Arizona is off to the best start by a Big 12 team since Kansas in 1996-97 (the conference\u2019s first year at 12 members) and could surpass that Jayhawks squad with a win Saturday vs. Oklahoma State.Arizona has been a top four seed in the NCAA Tournament in each of the last four seasons, a feat matched only by Purdue.Arizona will likely get a top two seed for the fourth time in five years, on pace with only Houston.Arizona is currently top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency at KenPom, something that\u2019s been done by just three teams in the last 10 seasons. Two of those teams, 2018-2019 Virginia and 2023-24 UConn went on to win the national title. Duke did it last year, falling in the national semifinals.With a win Saturday, Arizona could extend its streak atop the AP poll to nine weeks. The last team to hold a longer streak at No. 1 in the same season was Gonzaga in 2020-2021, Lloyd\u2019s last season there.<\/p>\n
It may only be early February, but it\u2019s not too early to appreciate what Lloyd and his staff are accomplishing.<\/p>\n
In a time when other powers are struggling to reinvent themselves in the era of NIL and the transfer portal, the program\u2019s bones keep getting stronger. And the bruises Arizona fans carry from years ago might just be starting to heal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Arizona beat ASU Saturday to improve to its best start in program history, Tommy Lloyd was asked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579626,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3724],"tags":[9763,7],"class_list":{"0":"post-579625","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-arizona-basketball","9":"tag-basketball"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116007076096044007","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}