Arizona vs. Purdue in Elite Eight: What’s at stake in No. 1 vs. No. 2 clash in March Madness
SAN JOSE – When Tommy Lloyd’s top-seeded Arizona Wildcats take on Matt Painter’s No. 2 Boilermakers on Saturday night, it will kick off 40 minutes of basketball testing that will be a source of anxiety for schools and fans.
There’s a Final Four trip to Indianapolis on the line, and with it, generational droughts looking to be eased.
Sure, Purdue reached 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 is still some overall atonement for the failures of last March for the Painter 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 adrift. The Boilers appear to have wasted their playoff prospects, fooling almost everyone since entering the Big Ten tournament on March 12. Painter’s players have rallied over the past three weeks, winning seven straight games and reestablishing their credentials as one of the best teams in the country. Purdue was No. 1 in the preseason and is looking to become the first team since North Carolina in 2008-09 to go from No. 1 in October to the last team standing in April.
“They look like the current team that everyone thought they were going to be at the beginning of the year,” Lloyd said Friday. “I was really impressed with what they did.”
A native of the Big Ten, one of four from that league competing in a regional final, Purdue is also trying to end the conference’s 26-year national championship drought. Getting to the Final Four is a huge threshold to cross, and really, the result that makes it seem concretely possible that the conference hexagon could come to an end. The program has never made two Final Fours in three years. With Braden Smith, Fletcher Loyer and Trey Kaufman-Renn as the core, this could be Painter’s last big chance to make the Final Four. You never know. Keep in mind that Purdue would have the pleasant advantage of playing on a Final Four stage less than an hour from campus.
On the other hand, the wait for Arizona’s Final Four has been torturous. The Wildcats have lost their last five regional final appearances (2003, 2005, 2011, 2014, 2015) and are trying to advance to the Final Four for the first time in 25 years. A win against Purdue would solidify Lloyd’s status on the game’s top coaching shortlist — and further elevate his candidacy for the vacant job at North Carolina.
Saturday night in San Jose marks just the fourth time a team picked No. 1 in the preseason has faced an NCAA Tournament team that ended up spending the most weeks at No. 1 (Arizona held it for nine weeks) in the same season. The last time this happened was Duke vs. Connecticut in the 1999 national title game.
The battle should be offensively good. This will be just the fifth time a regional final has featured teams averaging at least 85 points in the tournament while shooting at least 50 percent from the field and 40 percent from 3-point range in the previous three games. The Boilers are here after a 40-minute scare from a Texan team that kept threatening, winner only via timely notification via Kaufmann-Renn.
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Arizona? Another story Thursday. The Cats blitzed Arkansas and scored 109 (and felt like it could have been 125 if they wanted). The Wildcats had six players with at least 14 points against Arkansas, the first time in a tournament game that a team had that many players score that many points. Arizona shot almost as many free throws (30) as 2-pointers (32), its 94 points on those shots being 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 get to work and probably have some luck 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 game all the more interesting, considering Purdue made just four of its 20 shots from 3, tying a season low.
These are two coaches who do not bend to trends.
Arizona can win — no, it wins — without shooting a lot of 3s. Purdue usually can’t. Given the way Arizona is suffocating and changing, the Boilermakers probably won’t be able to make it to Indianapolis unless they reach the double-digit triple mark on Saturday night. That means Loyer’s perimeter contributions could be as crucial as anything else. He’s made 49.2 percent of his 3s over the last three games, all of which included at least four triples in Purdue’s tournament wins.
Painter has never knocked out a top seed in the Big Dance, going 0-7 throughout his career. Purdue is a 5.5-point underdog in the game, but it knocked off a Michigan team 13 days ago in the Big Ten Tournament championship that was playing as well then as Arizona is now. We’ll see if this recent experience matters later today, as both Arizona and Michigan have the lethal ability to kill a team’s chances with big runs in the second half.
“You see that at the end, where it’s just that push that they make, because that ends up making the difference,” Painter said Friday. “They have a 10-0 run at one point and you’re like, ah, they won by 11. You’re like the other team is right there. But that’s what they do. They use that surge to knock you out. Then they have games where they manhandle people and they shoot a lot of free throws. You have to be physical and not let them get to that point, but it’s easier said than done, because when you’re late to the games, they’ll get where they want to.”
The battle could be between the senior leaders. Braden Smith and Jaden Bradley don’t play the same way, but their value to their respective teams cannot 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 him know the level of execution required to reach the promised land.
Bradley has been as reliable in the final two minutes of games as any player in the country, including clutch shots against UConn in December and against Iowa State in the Big 12 semifinals. It’s fitting that these two can compete with so much on the line. Smith is one of the best point guards of all time, while Bradley is the Big 12 player of the year and the undisputed leader of perhaps the best team in Arizona of all time.
But these Wildcats will only have a real chance to claim that honor if they can win on Saturday and end the Elite Eight losing streak. Lloyd has continued to grow in this direction since the first year. No team in the last five seasons has more wins without a Final Four in that span than Arizona and its 147. Lloyd, whose 147 wins is the most of any coach in their first five seasons in college basketball history, has won more than 80 percent of his games since being given the keys to one of the best jobs in sports.
Now it’s peak time in San Jose, and for Arizona fans, the optimism of a stellar 35-2 season collides with flashbacks of epically disappointing Elite Eights over the past 23 years. The historic collapse against Illinois in 2005. The back-to-back failures against Frank Kaminsky and Wisconsin in 2014 (in overtime) and 2015. How ironic and cruel it would be for Purdue, another Big Ten team, to be the denier.
Two elite coaches with two special teams, but this bracket only leaves room for one of them to advance to the final stage of the season. Arizona vs. Purdue. A 1 against 2 for the Four. It was always built in this direction.
