SAN JOSE — When Tommy Lloyd’s top-seeded Arizona Wildcats tip off Saturday night against Matt Painter’s No. 2 Boilermakers, it will initiate 40 minutes of trial by basketball that will be caked in anxiety for both schools and fan bases.
There is a Final Four trip to Indianapolis on the line, and with it, generational droughts looking to be quenched.
Sure, Purdue made the Final Four just two years ago with back-to-back national player of the year Zach Edey, but that was then and this is now; there’s still some overall atonement for past March misses for Painter’s program.
The context of this season is also important: Purdue was comfortably the preseason No. 1 team. It started 17-1, then went 6-7 to close the regular season, finishing seventh in the Big Ten and playing like a team that was adrift. The Boilers seemed to have spoiled their postseason prospects, only to fool nearly everyone since they entered bracket play in the Big Ten Tournament on March 12. Painter’s players have rallied over the past three weeks, winning seven consecutive games and reestablishing their credentials as one of the nation’s best teams. Purdue was preseason No. 1 and is looking to become the first team since North Carolina in 2008-09 to go from No. 1 in October to last team standing in April.
“They look like the team right now everyone thought they were going to be at the start of the year,” Lloyd said Friday. “I’ve been really impressed with what they’ve done.”
Hailing from the Big Ten, one of four from that league playing in a regional final, Purdue is also trying to end the conference’s 26-year dry spell of national championships. Getting to the Final Four is a huge threshold to cross, and really, the result that makes it feel tangibly possible that the conference’s hex could end. The program’s never made two Final Fours in a three-year stretch. With Braden Smith, Fletcher Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn as the nucleus, this could be Painter’s last great chance to make a Final Four. You just never know. Keep in mind, Purdue would get the cozy benefit of playing on a Final Four stage less than an hour from campus.
On the other side, Arizona’s Final Four wait has been torturous. The Wildcats have lost the last five times they’ve played in a regional final (2003, 2005, 2011, 2014, 2015) and are trying to break through to the Final Four for the first time in 25 years. A win over Purdue would firm up Lloyd’s status on the short list of the game’s premier coaches — and elevate his candidacy for the vacant North Carolina job all the more.
Saturday’s San Jose soiree marks just the fourth time ever that a team picked No. 1 in the preseason is facing a team in the NCAA Tournament that wound up spending the most weeks at No. 1 (Arizona held it for nine weeks) in that same season. The last time it happened was Duke vs. Connecticut in the 1999 national title game.
The battle should be offensively beautiful. It’ll be just the fifth time a regional final features teams averaging at least 85 points in the tournament while shooting at least 50% from the field and 40% from 3-point range across the three previous games. The Boilers are here after a 40-minute scare from a Texas team that kept threatening, only winning via a timely tip-in via Kaufmann-Renn.
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Arizona? Different story on Thursday. The Cats blitzed Arkansas and scored 109 (and felt like it could’ve been 125 if they wanted). The Wildcats had six players with at least 14 points vs. Arkansas, the first time in a tournament game that a team had that many players score that many points. Arizona shot nearly as many free throws (30) as 2-pointers (32), its 94 points from those shots were the most in a tournament game since 2001 (Kansas in the Elite Eight).
Lloyd has a machine.
“I’m not surprised we’re sitting here. Not at all,” he said. “And I think we’re exactly where we should be, and now we’ve got to go put in the work and probably have some good fortune on our side as well to hopefully take the next step.”
Lloyd’s teams pound the paint and get to the foul line, while Purdue has the most efficient offense in the country — and is a team that thrives in the half-court while usually playing two bigs (Kaufman-Renn and Oscar Cluff) who don’t shoot from the perimeter. That makes Saturday’s matchup all the more interesting, considering Purdue hit just four of its 20 shots from 3, tying its season low.
They are two coaches who don’t bend to trends.
Arizona can win — no, does win — without shooting a lot of 3s. Purdue usually cannot. Given the way Arizona stifles and switches, the Boilermakers probably can’t get to Indianapolis unless they get to the double-digit mark of triples on Saturday night. That means Loyer’s perimeter contributions could be as critical as anything. He’s making 49.2% of his 3s the past three games, all of which included at least four made treys in Purdue’s tournament wins.
Painter has never taken out a 1-seed in the Big Dance, going 0-7 across his career. Purdue is a 5.5-point underdog in the game, but it did knock out a Michigan team in the Big Ten Tournament championship 13 days ago that was playing just as well then as Arizona is now. We’ll see if that recent experience matters later today, because both Arizona and Michigan carry a lethal ability to kill a team’s chances with big second-half runs.
“You see that at the end, where it’s just that spurt they make, because that ends up being the difference,” Painter said Friday. “They have a 10-0 run at some point and you’re like, ah, they won by 11. You’re like, the other team was right there. But that’s what they do. They use that one spurt to knock you out. Then they have games where they just manhandle people and they shoot loads of free throws. You’ve got to be physical and not let them get to that point, but that’s easier said than done, because when you get behind plays, they’re going to get where they want.”
The battle may come down to the senior point guards. Braden Smith and Jaden Bradley do not play similarly, but their value to their respective teams can’t be overstated. Smith, the NCAA’s all-time leader in assists (1,096 and counting), is a devilish distributor who has experience on this stage and the veteran teammates alongside to know the level of execution required to reach the promised land.
Bradley has been as reliable in the final two minutes of games as just about any player in the country, most notably with clutch game-clinching shots at UConn in December and over Iowa State in the Big 12 semis. It’s fitting these two get to face each other with this much on the line. Smith is one of the all-time great point guards, while Bradley is the Big 12 Player of the Year and the unquestioned leader on maybe the best Arizona team ever.
But these Wildcats will only get a real chance at claiming that honor if they can win on Saturday and snap the streak of Elite Eight losses. Lloyd has been crescendoing to this since Year 1. No team in the past five seasons has more wins without a Final Four in that span than Arizona and its 147. Lloyd, whose 147 victories are the most of any coach through their first five seasons in college basketball history, has won more than 80% of his games since being given the keys to one of the sport’s best jobs.
Now it’s cresting in San Jose, and for Arizona fans, the optimism of an outstanding 35-2 season is clashing with the flashbacks of epically disappointing Elite Eights over the past 23 years. The all-timer collapse vs. Illinois in 2005. The back-to-back denials to Frank Kaminsky and Wisconsin in 2014 (in overtime) and 2015. How ironic and cruel it would be to have Purdue, another Big Ten team, be the denier.
Two elite coaches with two special teams, but this bracket is only making room for one of them to move on to the last stage of the season. Arizona vs. Purdue. A 1 vs. 2 for the Four. It was always building to this.
