Post Your Best Excuses Here

[arxpert]

Post your excuses for the pitiful performance that Tommy's team has put on display over the last 4 games. Today being my final straw.

Or just say "You were right" and we can move forward on how to fix this situation properly.

Go ahead and start with "StAnFoRd CoULdN'T MiSsZ0rZ"

Now that the whole "Stanford couldn't miss" excuse is off the board, tell me how I've been wrong.

I will start with an Excuse that is unrelated to the most important problems I have pointed out:

Keshad Johnson has had 2 very bad games in a row by the standards we have been used to from him. Overall, this is part of my Caleb Love runs this team Theory, but I will call it out because it matters. If Tommy is going to allow Love and Keshad to waltz in the door and just takeover the team (in that order Love 1st, Keshad 2nd), then Keshad needs to be better.

Boswell, Pelle, Ballo are returning players that were supposed to have the cultural identity that Tommy wants in Tucson. Unfortunately they are just standing around watching Love and Keshad play their individual games. Bradley is forcing his way into action whenever he gets on the floor because he isn't a slouch and has self respect to go all in when he gets a chance. KJ Lewis has gotten more minutes and is setting a standard for himself because he can't sit around and watch players like Boswell and Pelle do piss poor jobs when he knows he is better.

I don't care what Number you put in front of the name Arizona, this is not a 1 nor 2 seed team the way Tommy is coaching it currently. The taste has been slapped out of Tommy's mouth by Purdue and this team has not been the same ever since. He yapped way too much "Ohhhh Purdue and Edey have never seen Arizona yet!!!" LOL. Yeah, well that really aged well now that we have 3 losses in 5 games + got slapped around all 2nd half @Cal.

I done said it. When you mess around and allow bad habits they come back to bite you. Tommy allowed a piss poor 2nd half effort @Cal and it carried right over into Stanford.

This is OFFICIALLY Caleb Love's team and it unfortunately chalk full of Soft Quitters with piss poor body language. I love Caleb Love's game. He is a dog with fight in him, but the issue here is he isn't going to stand around and watch everyone else pout when they are having bad games. So he will take 20-25 shots a game, override Tommy's "team system" at times. I don't blame him at all. Do you? When you see such horrid performances like this, can you really blame Caleb Love for wanting to take the bull by the horns? He is 1 man. He can't play 5 positions of defense.

Boo Boo Beta Boswell again has checked out. Directly from the Kerr Krissa school of being useless out there. 1-7 from 3 as of the time I am writing this. Unfortunately Boswell is not a Leader. He isn't a true Point Guard. At the NBA level he would only be eligible to play PG and he would get cooked by most PG's either way faster than him or taller with high release points. Boswell can't block a shot and he doesn't have fast hands. He also shies away from contact and can't play in the arc. He can go 2-11 from the floor all he wants if he is also facilitating and can dish 9 or 10 assists. 4 assists is not enough to justify his playing time. It is holding back the rest of the team.

Tommy should have benched him today just like I said. I remain right. No one has been able to disprove it.

We have hungrier players who want the ball. Boswell doesn't want the ball. 0 Free Throw Attempts again. I am close to saying Boswell is a Ballo level liability, but in reality Ballo is more useful than Boswell to the team at the moment.

Bradley is hungrier. 3-5 from the field is not why, it is the fact he attacks the rim.

I can live with KJ's 3-10. It included a bunch of everything. A 3, Free Throws, Offensive Rebounds, Assists, Steal

I have full confidence that we have a configuration that is better with Boswell coming off the bench going forward. Tommy needs to listen.

No fundamentals. Outplayed and outcoached. Tommy needs to get in the lab and figure this out before we are going to squander another Pac12 Title which would be very pathetic considering the best teams in this Conference are Bubble Teams on Selection Sunday at best.

[|ᴘ|ʀ|ʏ|ᴍ|ᴇ|]

1. No excuses. Terrible basketball.
2. Surprised this post didn't contain the word "crestfallen".

[Bear]

It's great that we can get 23 from Love on any given night but not with 0 assists and giving up 50.

This looked like a CSM team without the defense. No pressure on the rim.

Hopefully we play with a sense of urgency moving forward. Working on things, aka, phoning it in is avoidable. At least get the ball inbounded and up the court quicker. Makes working on things so much easier when they are on their heels.

[AztecWildcat]

No excuses we got out worked by a team with a losing record.

[Naterade]

Zero excuses for a shitty performance. However this is the problem with the emphasis on three poor shooting in Basketball. It's not terribly hard to swing the ball around and get a decent look from three. If a shitty team gets red hot it's difficult to beat them unless you play excellent in all facets of the game. On the bright side, this loss will probably stick with the team and hopefully keep them from fucking up this bad again. The 97 team lost the last few games of the regular season I think and were a five seed. So being a one doesn't mean shit, hasn't helped AZ all the much in March.

[akwildcat]

No excuse for a crappy performance. We got out worked by a lesser team. Though if i had to come up with a reason it might be that the team might have all gotten gonorrhea from Taylor Swift.

[Cactus🌵Cat]

Nearly every Elite 8 level team has inexplicable losses every single year.
Poor play, no excuse, bad loss, moving on.

[LeftCoastCats]

UCONN lost 6 games in a month last year before winning it all.

Kansas lost to Texas Tech and then TCU right before rattling off 9 straight wins to win it all the year prior.

Arguably the best Arizona team, our 2001 Wildcats, lost @Oregon and to Mississippi State as part of their 7 regular season losses. That Oregon team was bad, Stanford 23-24 bad. (Only won 5 conference games that year).

Our National Championship team lost 9 games, including the 2 games to close out the regular season leading to the tournament where we went on a truly historically magical run.

'94 we lost to a bad Washington team and dropped the final regular season game to ASU.

'88 - our best regular season in school history that officially put Arizona on the map, we lost to a middling New Mexico team.

It's college basketball. Losses happen unexpectedly, which is what makes it a beautiful game and my favorite variation of basketball.

Ebbs and flows exist and often times the lows help propel a team to their greatness. This team, man by man, is in my opinion a top 5 all-time Arizona team. I'd put them, admittedly prematurely, in the rare air of our 2001 squad.

The difference is these pieces are new to each other. This is what an elite team in the NIL transfer portal era will go through. Bad, unexplainable losses, especially early on.

I fully believe we're still among the 3 most likely teams to win it all. I'm validated in that belief by the odds makers and all of the advanced analytics. Pollsters be damned.

No excuse to lose to or play like we did against Stanford. Purdue and FAU have what Arizona literally couldn't have at this point in the season - a core group of guys with a defined role and long lasting chemistry built to endure. Yet both of those teams have inexplicable losses too.

We're literally still figuring out our roster. Rotations are in flux. New players being added into new spots game by game. Our floor leader is 18 years old for fuck sake.

To quote the coaching cliche - honor the process.

Basketball is crazy. College basketball is fundamentally wild. It's not any given Sunday - it's any given day.

"Cause every hand's a winner
And every hand's a loser
And the best that you can hope for
Is to die in your sleep"

[arxpert]

Our National Championship team lost 9 games, including the 2 games to close out the regular season leading to the tournament where we went on a truly historically magical run.

Our ONLY National Championship team. Keyword ONLY, was not expected to do anything at all.

A couple more clichés relevant to your comments:

1. "It's Getting Late, Early"
---> We are now in Conference play. It's not the final 10 games of the year, but those games are coming up soon. Tommy should consider figuring out what the plan is sooner than later so the team can gel properly. Shuffling the deck midseason may or may not be the answer, but make a decision and Coach it to the best of your ability is my opinion on that. At this point I would make the decision to put either Boswell or Love on the bench and figure out how to spread the extra starter minutes around to Bradley, KJ, and Boro/Paulius so that we are in fact a 9 player deep team with options available to contribute instead of shortening the rotation down the stretch and living + dying with 6 guys + a Ballo/Krivas faux rotation since we know with Certainty that Ballo is a liability. This team is currently missing the Henri type player who is a stretch big with length to defend inside and also length to get back out and contest the perimeter. Neither Ballo nor Krivas are quick enough to do that. Boro/Paulius may be if given enough minutes to justify being on the court when we inevitably run into teams who decide to hack Ballo and take their chances with 3s vs us Early before defaulting to playing a more standard approach. Everyone is going to test their "heat" from 3 vs us if Tommy refuses to scheme to defend the perimeter. Doesn't matter how bad a team is from 3. As you put it, this is College Basketball. You only need to be right 1 time to beat someone way out of your league then go from there.

2. "Be at your best when your best is needed" -John Wooden
---> Tommy has failed at this in the routinely same ways I have pointed out. The bad habits continue to add up no matter what year you look at since Tommy took over. This can lead one to believe Tommy is the commonality when you speak about so much of a lack of chemistry or consistency, he is the one pillar we can look to and he has done well. There are plenty of Tommy appreciation posts from me if you choose to look, but with all due credit comes fair criticism.

[arxpert]

Kansas lost to Texas Tech and then TCU right before rattling off 9 straight wins to win it all the year prior.

I also want to point out that a comment I made in the past is going to hold true the rest of the season now that we are in Conference play.

The Pac12 is a very weak Conference. We are essentially the only team that can help any of the Conference with their "Resume" for Selection Sunday. So not only are we a high ranked team that will be heckled on the road with the token "overrated" chants, but we are in fact the HUNTED every single game Home or Away as Every team in the Pac12 is praying to beat us, especially "on the road" in our "hostile environment" that is about as hostile as a Golden Retriever puppy.

So while we are going through the motions of Weak Conference Play, we have everything to lose every single game with very little that can help our resume and our opponents have nothing, but opportunity after opportunity to pad their Resume. The only thing we can gain is a Conference Title and then play for a Conference Banner. If Tommy is going to roll out this type of poor product against the likes of Cal and Stanford then I am very concerned.

I honestly do not believe this team believed their own hype at #1. I think they peaked early and have now been adjusted to. Tommy hasn't made his next set of adjustments yet. We have to see what he will do overall. It is a very troubling crossroads to the season. Hopefully I can use my patented Onward and Up Beardown sooner than later.