Tommy Lloyd, Caleb Love, Anthony Dell’Orso, Tobe Awaka, and Henri Veesaar pregame preview 2nd Round matchup between Arizona and Oregon.

SEATTLE – See what Tommy Lloyd, Caleb, Love, Anthony Dell’Orso, Tobe Awaka, and Henri Veesaar had to say pregame to the media on Saturday ahead of the 4-seed Arizona Wildcats’ Second Round matchup against 5-seed Oregon on Sunday.

Tommy Lloyd

Tommy Lloyd pregame on the history between Arizona and Oregon as former members of the Pac-12:

“I mean, first off, obviously we have a lot of respect for Oregon. We’ve battled with them the past three years, and I know those battles go way before me, as well. I know there’s been a good run of Oregon and Arizona, heated battles in game.

It is a little weird playing them in the second round of the tournament because it’s a team that you’re used to being a conference rival, and usually you wouldn’t see that until later in the NCAA Tournament.

For it to happen earlier, it’s interesting, but it’s a great thing. Anytime you’re in the tournament and whoever you’re playing the next game, you’re excited. Obviously, it’s a program and a coach I have a lot of respect for, and I’m sure both teams’ staffs probably sat down and watched the film yesterday, and they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s right. I think there was probably a lot of those familiar things.

Both programs have a conviction in the way they play and a style of play that kind of suits themselves and their personnel. There’s probably a lot of familiarity on both sides, but it’s a new year.

A new year, a few new players sprinkled in here, some returning players that have gotten better on both sides. It obviously is going to be a challenging game Sunday evening.”

Tommy Lloyd on Nate Bittle’s development during his four-year career at Oregon:

Yeah, obviously, I saw Nate when he was in high school. He was somebody that — we knew how talented he was. Just at the time I was at Gonzaga, and we had a good inkling we were going to get another tall, skinny kid named Chet Holmgren. You couldn’t take every tall, skinny kid. He visited us, but I think we and they knew that we were probably going another direction. And so, he was a great get for Oregon.

What they’ve done a great job of is it takes time. It takes time for guys like him to develop. Like a Chet Holmgren is an anomaly. Most tall, thin guys, it takes time. So just to see him develop over the course of a career is awesome for me because I appreciate what it takes to get better. I know how hard it is to get better. I know the patience it takes. I know the hard days. I know the things that go on behind the scenes with the uncertainties that you have to overcome, the reassurances you need from the coaching staff to hang with it.

To see him where he’s at now, it’s awesome, and obviously, it’s an affirmation for me that that’s still the right way to do it. I love developing players, and I always have. Hopefully, you’re always going to have big guys developing in our program. We have one of them right now, Henri Veesaar, who’s on a similar track. A very good player, and he’s done a great job. Crazy respect for him for hanging with it and getting better, fighting through injuries, fighting through just physical things. When you’re young, you’re just not quite strong enough. So nothing but respect for Nate and what he’s become as a player.”

Tommy Lloyd pregame on if being familiar with Oregon makes a one-day turnaround easier for Arizona to prepare for:

“Well, I mean, you might feel like you have — there’s a little more comfort as a coach as you start developing a scout, basically installing a game plan. But what matters is what the players can retain.

In a quick turnaround, you might have all these great ideas, but you also have to remember, last year we played them three times, and you kind of had a buildup over the court of the year. This year, you play them once. The third time or the second time, hey, this worked, that didn’t work, you’re able to make actual adjustments where the players understand. This one you’re going in fresh.

You hope you hit it right, and you hope you make some of the right decisions.

These games come down to — there’s some scouting, there’s some scheming, but it comes down to doing what you do well and finding a way to do it within those 40 minutes. I don’t know if you can get too tricky this time of year on quick, short turnarounds.”

Tommy Lloyd pregame on the resiliency of Arizona and Oregon preparing themselves for the tournament:

“Well, I think it’s interesting. I think us and Oregon, probably both — I don’t know exactly what their schedule is. Barely can remember what ours was. But we’re probably both on the tougher side. They won a few close games, we lost a few close games. But it’s a long year, and I knew we had a good team. I knew we had to get better and there was a sense of urgency, but I knew we had a good team.

If you want your team to be steady and consistent, as a coach, you have to be steady and consistent. So we stayed the course. We didn’t blow things up or panic, and we had some tough days, and we practiced hard, and we got better, and we acknowledged our deficiencies and tried to overcome them and figured out what our strengths were and tried to accentuate them. It’s been an awesome journey. It’s been an awesome journey for me as a coach.

You don’t get into coaching, especially having done it as long as I have, and expect to win every game. Losing is part of the process. So how you handle that losing impacts how your season is going to go, and then you get down to these tournaments, and obviously now your back is against the wall, as is your opponent’s, because there is no more let’s go back and review the film and make a few adjustments. You end up in these one-game scenarios, and that’s what you build for, so we’re excited for the opportunity tomorrow.”

Tommy Lloyd on the identity of Dana Altman’s teams at Oregon:

“Dana has a real ability to get his players to do what he wants them to do. It’s that simple. Whether that’s directing shots, going at matchups, he has a real certainty in the stuff that he runs because he’s run it a long time. I think — I’m not in his head, but I think he probably has a Rolodex of options he can go through. I want to get the ball to this guy against this matchup on this spot on the floor. I don’t think he needs to look at a sheet of paper. I think he knows what he’s going to do.

He has a real certainty in what he does. He’s not afraid in these games to make adjustments, whether it’s on the defensive end or whatever. So he has a great ability in games to give his team a chance to win. If something is not working, he changes, and I’ve always respected that about him.”

Tommy Lloyd pregame on Arizona and Oregon leaving the Pac-12 and its impact on West Coast basketball:

“Listen, obviously, I think that with these conferences just spanning, basically, the country, I think us on the west are going to have to fight hard for our place at the table and for our identity because we don’t have a league that’s basically committed to a region of the country.

To me, yeah, we’re going to have to fight. We’re going to have to fight. We’re going to have to scratch. We’re going to have to claw and let people know we’re here. How do you do that? You win, and you’re successful, and you’re competitive, and you play a national schedule. Those are the things that we’re going to do to continue to let people know that Arizona basketball is here for it. We’re here for it. Just because we’re the furthest west team in the conference or one of them in our conference that goes all the way to Orlando and Morgantown and Cincinnati, we’re okay out here. We’re here for it, and we’re going to fight for our place at the table.”

Tommy Lloyd on Grant Weitman hitting a 3-point shot in the tournament after deciding to return to Tucson for a fifth year:

“It’s awesome. Grant has done an incredible job for our career. The Weitman family has an incredible legacy in connection with Arizona basketball. Grant’s grandfather, Paul Weitman, was Lute Olson’s best friend, and traveled with the team and was around them all the time. So his dad, Niele and his uncle, Craig, grew up in Tucson with Arizona basketball fans and now their kids are doing the same thing.

You know, just to have a kid tell you — because Grant is a really good player. We thought we’d got him an opportunity to go play at NAU because my son Liam was just leaving. There was an opportunity. They needed someone like Grant, and Grant could kind of go there and kind of play the role that Liam played for them. And it was his fifth year and I was like, man, you’re a good player. Like, maybe you should reward yourself and go play, get real minutes because it’s probably not going to happen here.

He went up there, visited, did the deal, they talked about going, they wanted him, and he came back to my office and he said — his exact quote was, ‘I love basketball, but I love Arizona basketball more. So I want to stay one more year and give this a go and see what we can do with this team’.

When you have kids like that on your roster, that care factor, it means a lot. And I know, I made no bones about it, I inherited a special legacy that goes and will go way beyond me. And so, my job right now is just to kind of wrap my arms around it and make sure that those that love it understand that it means that much to me, as well, and the program is in good hands, and we’re going to do everything we can to honor those that come before us and make it a better place for those that come next.”

Tommy Lloyd pregame on the prospect of a home-and-home series between Arizona and Oregon:

“Yeah, right when the thing happened we might have had an initial conversation, but the UCLA-Arizona thing is easy. It’s something that — especially with Arizona State being in our conference. I mean, UCLA was such a rival down there for so many years, that it was an easy home-and-home to jump on right away, and it made a lot of sense.

Then I think Dana and I and all the other coaches that are involved in this conference probably took a step back and are trying to figure out what is the proper way to schedule with regards to your new conference because you don’t want to over schedule, you don’t want to under schedule. I’m sure those conversations will spark back up.”

Tommy Lloyd pregame on Arizona using its defensive toughness and identity against Oregon:

“Well, when we’ve been right defensively this year, we’ve been hard to beat. But we’ve also had some days our defense hasn’t been good, and our offense has carried us. To me, you want to be as good as you can on both sides of the ball to kind of give yourself the best chance to win, whether that’s your offense carrying you or your defense carrying you.

One of the things I’ve learned about these tournament games is — is there momentum? I don’t know. I think the moment the ball goes up, it’s 0-0, it’s 40 minutes, it’s two new teams, I don’t think you can assume because we played good on Friday night that we’re going to carry that momentum into Sunday.

You have to be really careful, and you have to understand that the score is 0-0, the ball goes up, and you’ve got to go — anything good that’s going to come of Sunday, you have to make that happen during that 40-minute game on Sunday. Nothing from Friday really impacts that.”

Tommy Lloyd on if he is trying to hide Henri Veesaar from the NBA this season:

“That’s insulting. Who are these NBA people? I’ve never seen them. Are these, like, sources?

Listen, people who say that — I’ll just say this: A lot of people have answers to tests they’ve never passed. I’m a coach. I’m coaching my team. Anybody that thinks I’m holding a kid back is crazy. But you know what? On a team, you have other players. You have other scenarios, and there’s this thing called fouls, there’s this thing called fatigue. You don’t get to coach a team in a vacuum.

It literally makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when people are saying that ‘you know what’, because it’s coming from a place of ignorance, and it’s really disrespectful to say to a coach. To think that I would hide a kid is crazy. So yeah, on that note, thank you guys.”

Caleb Love

Caleb Love pregame on what he remembers about Arizona playing against Oregon:

“They’re well-coached, and we know they’re a great team. They have a great history in that program. They want to play in a lot of ball screens and things like that.

I think they’re well rounded with the guys that they have. They play their roles really well. Obviously, they’ve got Shelstad and Bittle as their go-to guys, but the other guys, they pitch in where they need to, and we’ve just got to be ready for every punch that they give us.”

Caleb Love on his career-high 36-point performance against Oregon last season:

“It was at Oregon, by the way. We lost in the Pac-12 tournament. So that’s kind of what I remember most, us losing that game. But it’s not if I can repeat the 36 points, it’s not like that. I’ve got to do whatever the team needs for me to do to help the team win, and that’s what I’m going to try to do. Most importantly, we have to play well as a group, and we’ve got to handle our ones individually, as far as guarding and executing the game plan as best we can.”

Caleb Love on his relationship with Tommy Lloyd:

“Yeah, he’s meant a lot to me. He kind of gave me a second chance at this college thing, and he accepted me for who I was and didn’t have any preconceived notions about me. Our relationship has grown over the past two years, and I respect him as a coach. I respect him as an individual. He cares about you, not just on the court, but off the court, and I appreciate him for sticking with me throughout the ups and downs. And like I said, our relationship has grown, and I’m just looking forward to continuing this thing.”

Anthony Dell’Orso

Anthony Dell’Orso on bouncing back from back-to-back turnovers in the game against Akron:

“Yeah, obviously, it’s my first tournament, kind of get those nerves and butterflies out of the system at the start, you know, some things that I can clean up that are easily fixable. I haven’t thought twice about it. Just doing what I do normally, knocking down open shots, playing the right role, whether that’s shooting, passing, rebounding, all those sort of things. I think that’s why Tommy trusts me to go back in, because it’s not just scoring that I can bring.

Things happen in the game, and it is what it is, but you’ve got to bounce back from that. So I was just happy that we were able to bounce back in the second half and get that win.”

Tobe Awaka

Tobe Awaka on Arizona fans traveling in the postseason:

“Yeah, I think we, as a team and as a program, are really thankful for our Arizona fans. At McKale they give us such a great home-court advantage, and wherever we go across the country, they travel so well.

I think to all of us up here, it’s no surprise that they’re traveling up here, as well.”

Henri Veesaar

Henri Veesaar pregame on what he remembers about Arizona playing against Oregon:

“I would say they’re a great team. They rise up in big moments whenever they need a win. I think it’s going to be a great team tomorrow. They’re definitely going out to fight. In the Pac-12, we had a lot of battles with them. I think they’re a little bit different team than we played the last two years, but they’re going to definitely come out tomorrow.”