At the Haas Pavilion, in Berkeley, California, the Arizona Wildcats took care of business and swept the Bay Area for the first time since the 2011-12 season as they defeated the Califormia Golden Bears by a final score of 73-50.
The first half of play was definitely one to forget about for both schools as Arizona and Cal struggled to shoot the ball. Cal made only nine baskets out of their 25 attempts, which is an abysmal 36%. They were even worse from the three-point line as they made only one of their five shots from beyond the arc. In that same half, though, Arizona was not much better on the offensive side of the ball. Although the Wildcats attempted only 20 shots in the first 20 minutes, they did manage to make ten of them, going two for three from behind the three-point line.
At the 12:28 minute mark, Stanley Johnson made a free throw to extend Arizona’s lead to 11-4. However, that would be their last point until Dusan Ristic tipped in a shot to take a 13-11 lead. During that stretch, Cal really took over the game, made some nice passes, made Arizona work on offense, and forced the Wildcats to take bad shots. However, after five minutes of play, they were able to score only seven points to tie the game up. At any level of basketball, that simply will not get the job done. Yes, the saying goes that defense wins championships, but if a team can’t score at all, how can anyone expect it to win?
Once again, it was the performance of freshman phenom Johnson who led all scorers as he put up 18 points, went 5 of 10 from the field, and nabbed nine boards. The Wildcats won all of the key battles as well. They outrebounded Cal by a margin of 31-25; the bench clobbered Cal’s, scoring 24 points, while the Golden Bears' bench did not score a single point. Finally, Arizona won the points-off-turnovers ratio as well with Sean Miller’s squad scoring eight more points – 20-12 off turnoevers – than Cal did.
Arizona will take on the Oregon schools down in Tucson this coming week with Oregon up first on Wednesday, followed up with OSU two days later. California will go up north to take on Washington State on Thursday then Washington the following Saturday.