While Kentucky have been aiming to be the first team since Indiana in 1976 to finish the season with the championship and a perfect record, the Arizona Wildcats have been quietly going about their business in the relative anonymity of late night Pac-12 basketball. This can be the only reason that Arizona, who have lost a grand total of two games by a combined five points since the turn of the year, have found themselves as the two seed instead of the one seed in the West.
To beat a team like Kentucky your guard play has the be experienced and it has to be mistake free. In senior point guard T.J. McConnell the Arizona Wildcats have a player who averages 6.4 assists per game while shooting at an almost 50% clip. This steadiness and ability to pick the right time to pass and the right time to exploit the Kentucky defense on his own is one of the reasons that McConnell is the ideal point guard to ruin Kentucky’s season.
The key to any Arizona upset bid however will be their much ballyhooed freshmen Stanley Johnson. Johnson checks in at right around 6-7, 240 pounds and he can do just about anything you would require on a basketball court. It is possible that Johnson would be among the top five picks in the 2015 NBA Draft of he were to declare after this season and his combination of size and speed would be one of the few match up problems which Kentucky would find themselves facing in the tournament.
Johnson averages 14.1 points per game. This is obviously a decent number, but it is actually low giving his ability to handle the ball, shoot, and offensive rebound. The feeling is though that Johnson is a big game player. The comparison here might be Cleanthony Early who was the best player on the floor last year when Wichita State faced of with Kentucky in the round of 32. If Johnson comes into the game feeling that he has something to prove, that he needs to be at his best to show that he belongs in the same conversation as the eight NBA talents on Kentucky’s roster, then he might just become the game changer that Arizona are counting on this March.
Obviously one of the biggest problems when facing Kentucky is matching their size AND athleticism. This is one of the areas where Arizona stacks up against the Wildcats better than anyone else. Johnson is just part of a group of athletic wing players with monster wingspans who will have the ability to get in the Kentucky players faces and change their shots. Rondae Hollis-Jefferson is another 6-7 players, but he has the wingspan of a 7-footer and has been lights out on some of the best scorers in the Pac-12.
Brandon Ashley was voted the Pac-12 Tournament MVP, due to his 19.7 points and 6.3 rebounds per game in the tournament, and at 6-9 he is another who will make life harder on Kentucky. Arizona even has a 7-footer of their own down low in Kaleb Tarczewski who will be able to bang bodies effectively with Karl-Anthony Towns and Willie Cauley-Stein. To beat Kentucky a team cannot let their players control the game in the low post and that will be exactly the role Tarczewski fills.
There is a reason that the Arizona Wildcats sit proudly at number 2 in the Kenpom rankings. Their adjusted defense efficiency ranking is third in the nation, behind only Kentucky and Virginia, while their offense checks in at 11th. They rank 15th in country in points allowed at less than 59 points per game, despite playing in a Pac-12 conference which is known as being more open and free flowing than the conferences back east. They rebound well, they shoot with a high efficiency, and on paper at least the Arizona Wildcats are going to be one of, if not the biggest, threat to the “Pursuit of Perfection”.
This is the second in our series of articles where we look at teams who can stop Kentucky and their “Pursuit of Perfection” in this year’s NCAA Tournament. Previously we took a look at the Gonzaga team which many consider to be the best Mark Few has ever put together in Spokane.