Arizona Basketball: Wildcats take care of business against the Miners

The Arizona Basketball teams continued their winning ways at home, winning 79-46 over the UTEP Miners on Wednesday evening.

3-0! Winning feels good, and right now they way the Arizona Basketball team is playing, has us fans feeling good as well.

Winners in their last three games at home, the Wildcats will now prepare for the Maui Invitational, where they will face off against Iowa State in round one of the stacked tournament, starting on Monday.

Arizona Wildcats

The ‘Brandon’s’ or the “Brandon’s Buckets” (Brandon Williams and Brandon Randolph) as we’ve named them, have been playing tremendous basketball, and once again turned in tremendous performance.

On Wednesday night against UTEP, both led the way in scoring with 21 points each. However, it was defense, high percentage shots, limiting the turnovers, etc. as reasons why this team ran away with the 79-46 victory.

The team used a couple strong, late runs in this one to pull away, but regardless, this was a necessary tune-up game with the Maui Invitational right around the corner. Maybe not a ‘trap game’, but it would have been easy for this team to lose focus against the Miners, luckily they didn’t.

From the start, Arizona was locked in on defense, even head coach Sean Miller, who turned 50 (Happy Birthday Coach!), had his team play full court press in this one, which caused some turnovers. Nice to see Miller mixing it up and try something Wildcats fans are not used to seeing.

Additionally, the Wildcats were looking to take high-quality shots, not really forcing anything early.

Just five minutes into the game, the Wildcats looked all business, taking an early 13-4 lead, never really looking back. The closest the Miners would get is within six points early in the second half.

In the first half, Williams led his team in scoring with 15 points and no turnovers. He would finish the game with no turnovers as well and currently has no turnovers yet this season! B-Will for the season has 14 assists and 0 turnovers. That’s what you call taking care of the ball!

Williams is showing why he is one of the top freshmen in the country this year. Not only is he looking to take his shot, but he is wanting to get his teammates involved with passes like this to Ira Lee:

Even though the Wildcats weren’t shooting all that great from the field and free throw line, they were still able to find ways to get high percentage shots. The one key stat this team will need to improve upon will be from the charity stripe. The Wildcats finished the game 17-29. In close games, it will come down to making those and won’t be able to afford to miss too many.

The second half the Wildcats were a little more efficient on the offensive end, with Randolph leading the team with 14 points. Chase Jeter showed his footwork down low, finishing with 15 points and five rebounds, and senior point guard Justin Coleman also had a solid showing in 26 minutes of play, adding seven points, five rebounds, three assists and showed some real toughness.

Lee made his presence felt in the second half, filling up the stat sheet nicely, finishing with seven points, seven rebounds, and one block. Dylan Smith, who went 4-7 from three against Cal Poly, struggled against UTEP, but that didn’t stop him from playing tenacious defense in 18 minutes of play.

Overall, the Wildcats outrebounded the Miners 36-35, had only six turnovers, forced 15 which led to 22 points. One of the key stats in tonight’s performance besides limiting turnovers was points in the paint.

A combination of attacking the rim and finding Lee and Jeter down low contributed to that advantage the Cats had. The Miners fought hard, put up a good fight, but in the end, couldn’t put together any consecutive runs to cause any concern for the Wildcats.

From here on out, the road will only get tougher for the Wildcats as they will face a talented, yet depleted Iowa State team on Monday. They will need to use the momentum and confidence from these last three games and carry that over right from tip-off against the Cyclones.

In tonight’s game, it was clear this team is starting to understand the importance of defense and how it will play a crucial part in this team’s success this season.

In addition to it being Coach Miller’s birthday, he also earned himself a “birthday gift”, earning his 250th win while at Arizona in just 324 games coached. Way to go Coach!

Here are the highlights from Arizona’s 33-point win over UTEP!

At Zona Zealots, we would like to congratulate the Wildcats on another win. We take for granted these wins, but we know how much hard work goes into making that happen. Great to see the progress this team is making early in the 2018-19 season and we look forward to many more great moments. Bear Down, Arizona!