What Tommy Lloyd said after Arizona’s win at Washington

Jan 29, 2023 - 2:00 AM

Late in the first half, with Arizona still trailing in a game it would eventually win by 23, coach Tommy Lloyd looked about as casual as one could be at that point. Rather than pacing the sideline he was sitting on the bench, legs crossed and hands over his knees.

It was almost like he knew the Wildcats would not only take the lead into halftime but would run away with it in the second half.

“We haven’t had a game like that in a while,” Lloyd said after the 95-72 win at Washington, the UA’s fourth straight victory. “We got that little paranoia when we know, if we don’t bring it and play great we’re gonna be in a ballgame. So it was fun to get a game like that, because we haven’t had one of those, a lopsided one, in a long time.”

Our full recap of the win can be found here. Below is what else Lloyd said during his postgame interview on 1290-AM:

On if the second half was Arizona’s best half of basketball this season: “It felt like it. We just we kind of hit a good flow. I thought we played good in the first half. Maybe our defensive pressure wasn’t kind of where we wanted it to be early and they made a few threes, and then we settled into the game. I thought we defended well, took a 4-point lead they cut it to two. I went into half feeling pretty good and got in the second half I just kind of had my fingers crossed we did kind of make an early run at them and really, really put them on their heels a little bit and we did it. And we just kept kept throwing haymakers and kept making great plays and timely plays. So the guys were awesome.”

On what worked better against Washington’s zone: “Everything. There wasn’t one thing that wasn’t better. Just the way we shot the ball, the way we moved the ball, just the patients we played with. We didn’t run a bunch of sets, we kind of let the guys kind of hoop, and they did a great job playing with fundamentals and using their pass fakes and movement. And then our bigs delivered, and when our bigs delivered like that ... I had a better feel about the game when I saw Oumar (Ballo), I think his first catch he went and he really attacked the guy’s body and went right into him, and so I knew I was like, okay, this is the mentality we need and we carried it on for most of the game.”

On the key to facing a zone: “You got to have some patience about you, you got to have some savvy, because they’re really good playing with their arms out. And things look like they’re open but they’re not open. We had a couple of our turnovers, inexperienced guys playing against that zone, it’s really hard to beat that zone from the top. The high post from the top. Their guards do a good job of kind of, I mean, it’s staggeting a little bit where one’s up and the other one’s breaking on that bounce pass into the high post, and they got us a couple of times on that. And then those are lessons learned for our guys, but all in all, we connected passes better, we moved better and then we hit some timely shots.”

On Courtney Ramey and Kerr Kriisa combining for 10 3-pointers: “We were flowing and it was great to see.”