Arizona’s 2025-26 roster will include players from three continents and six countries. That’s nothing new under Tommy Lloyd, who cut his teeth in the business as an international recruiter and that has continued as a head coach.
But the current roster also includes a player who grew up in Tucson, yet needed to go across the country for a few years—and endure a major injury—before being able to live the dream of being on his hometown team.
“I never would have thought it was happening if you would have asked me four or five years ago,” senior guard Evan Nelson said Friday. “But I think it just goes to shows that there’s not one way to achieve your goals. There’s multiple roads, multiple paths, if you just keep working every day to make it happen.”
Nelson, who played high school basketball just up the street from campus at Salpointe Catholic, is the UA’s lone pickup from the NCAA transfer portal. He comes to the Wildcats after four years at Harvard, where he started 51 games but also had to miss a season because of an Achilles injury. That injury, which cost Nelson his junior season, paved the way for him to finish his career in Tucson.
Ivy League schools do not permit redshirts, meaning the 2024-25 season was the last Nelson could play for Harvard. He knew that was the case throughout last year, when he averaged 9.1 points per game and shot 40.4 percent from 3-point range.
“It was in the back of my mind,” Nelson said. “I knew that I’d have the opportunity if I wanted to, to play another season of college basketball as a graduate student. But I didn’t want to get too worked up in that. Just wanted to stay in the moment and finish it out with my team.”
Once in the portal, there was no other place Nelson wanted to go. Assistant coach TJ Benson made that possible by reaching out soon after to get the ball rolling.
“People said that I came here because it’s the Harvard of the West,” Nelson said. “But I think as far as in the basketball world and in the sports world, nobody has an alumni network like Arizona. You see where guys have been, not only in the NBA, but just in the professional sports world of broadcasting, like there’s not a lot of opportunities at other schools outside of Arizona where I could have the opportunity to network.”
Arizona added Nelson to provide starting point guard Jaden Bradley, who averaged 34.1 minutes per game in 2024-25, with an experienced backup.
“It doesn’t take you long, you talk to Evan one time, and you see his character,” Lloyd said in June. “You see his seriousness. And the thing that I really saw was just his Tucson roots are real, and his love for Arizona basketball is real. And to me, when you have a good player that has that, you got to pay attention to it. We’re excited for what he can add to this team.”
Nelson was technically the second addition to the 2025-26 team. The first came in November when forward Dwayne Aristode signed out of Brewster Academy in New Hampshire.
That was just the latest stop for Aristode, who grew up in The Netherlands and played three years of club ball in Spain before coming to the United States in 2023. He also missed a full season due (2024-25) to injury, a lower leg ailment similar to what sidelined Motiejus Krivas.
“Dwayne is really talented; I think he’s maybe been forgotten about, which is crazy to say,” Lloyd said. “Dwayne is talented enough and was playing on a big enough stage … it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for him to be McDonald’s All-American. I’m excited to see his contributions. He’s got great size, he’s got great strength, I think he has really good potential physicality wise, he’s got a good skill level. There’s nothing that tells me that he’s going to be a long term development project. I think he’s going to be ready for day one.”
Aristode—who speaks seven languages—is one of seven freshmen Arizona has added for the upcoming season. Though rated by 247Sports as a 5-star prospect, and No. 24 overall in the 2025 class, he comes to the UA with far less fanfare than fellow 5-star recruits Koa Peat and Brayden Burries and 3-star guard Bryce James, the son of NBA great LeBron James.
“I fully understand,” Aristode said of his lack of hype. “I’ve been keeping receipts. Senior year, even though I’d not been playing, I’d been under listening. I’m not stressed.”
At 6-foot-8 and 215 pounds, Aristode should be able to hold his own with Arizona’s other frontcourt players. Nelson, at 6-2 and 170, has already seen what it’s like to go up against Bradley and the Wildcats’ other guards in practice.
“I had a welcome to Arizona basketball, welcome to the Big 12 moment of being in a workout with JB and Brandon Burries,” he said. “These guys are a little bit bigger than me and JB just ran through me. I fell over. He made a layup. Everybody’s like, ‘welcome to Big 12!’”