When sideline reporter Andy Katz asked Arizona’s Caleb Love on Sunday night how the Wildcats can beat Duke in the Sweet 16, the 5th-year guard took a moment to think through what he was going to say next.
Love isn’t known to hold back, especially when it comes to the Blue Devils, the archnemesis that fairly or not has defined much of his career. But in this case, Love leaned into rhetoric that wouldn’t give Duke any extra ammunition entering Thursday’s matchup.
“I just say, we gotta go back, we gotta watch film, we gotta get ready for them,” Love said. “We’ll be ready for them when it’s time.”
Love’s answer reflected an air of humility. The 2024-25 Duke Blue Devils are a gauntlet and everyone knows it. Love more than most.
When Arizona hosted Duke at McKale Center four months ago, the Blue Devils held him to 3-of-13 shooting including 1 of 9 from 3-point range.
Arizona held its own with Duke for the game’s first 10 minutes, but it eventually became evident which team held the advantage. Duke’s height, physicality and shooting outweighed any deficiencies as far as the inexperience of its prodigious freshmen class. Cooper Flagg scored 24 points and Kon Knueppel added 13 on a trio of 3-pointers as Duke won 69-55.
After the game, Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd admitted it was a “tough night for me and the program” while pledging to figure out “why the pieces aren’t fitting together” as well as he would have liked.
A maelstrom brewed online over whether Lloyd was right to bring back Love for another season and if the Wildcats had the toughness to go toe to toe with the sport’s best programs.
With Arizona set to play Duke in the on Thursday night in Newark with a trip to the Elite 8 on the line, those questions have been answered and then some.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations, and Caleb has so much potential and he’s so good already,” Lloyd said Sunday after Arizona’s round of 32 win over Oregon. “What’s cool is how much better he can get. And his approach today, just staying steady and staying unemotional.”
Arizona answered any lingering questions over whether it can battle through distress by coming back from an early double digit deficit to the Ducks.
“Us going down early, we never panicked, we never altered anything,” Love said Sunday. “I just think we were so poised throughout that whole game, and nobody was worried about anything but finishing out the game and winning the game.”
The same couldn’t necessarily be said about the Arizona team that played Duke in November. When the Wildcats got down multiple possessions, Duke kept the deficit where it was and down the stretch grew it into double digits.
Addition by subtraction
As Lloyd and his staff assembled the tools in their arsenal, they would soon figure out that one had to be temporarily put out of use.
Motiejus Krivas was expected to be Arizona’s dominant big man this season after showing great flashes of potential in 2023-24 but got off to a slow start in nonconference play due to an offseason foot injury. Krivas was relatively ineffective in the Duke contest—a game he started after previously coming in off the bench behind Tobe Awaka.
Henri Veesaar and Awaka played a combined 25 minutes against Duke. It didn’t help that neither player entered the heavyweight fight with much experience playing alongside Love, Jaden Bradley and KJ Lewis. After the game, Lloyd implied that the team’s makeup would take time to form.
“We got to figure out what our certainties are, and the things we have to have, and then over the course of the next couple of days, if there’s adjustments we need to make, we need to figure out what those are,” Lloyd said.
When it became clear by early December that Krivas’ foot injury would keep him out the remainder of the year, Lloyd was forced to elevate to Awaka and Henri Veesaar to bigger roles. As commentators like ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla would point out, Krivas’ absence helped solidify Arizona’s rotation.
Hate to say this is “addition by subtraction” but, in a sense, the injury to @ArizonaMBB big man Mo Krivas has shortened the Wildcats’ rotation and clearly defined roles. Jaden Bradley is the underrated key to this team. KJ Lewis off the bench has been terrific. Freshman Carter…
— Fran Fraschilla (@franfraschilla) January 8, 2025
With another chance at facing Duke’s bigs, Lloyd is far more confident in Veesaar and Awaka’s ability to go at the Blue Devils.
Speaking on Saturday about the development process of young players, Lloyd pointed to someone like Veesaar of developing a mastery of the system the Arizona coaches try to implement.
“When they finally do rise up like a Henri Veesaar, they have corporate knowledge,” Lloyd said. “They know how the business is run. I think that’s really valuable.”
On Thursday, the knowledge and experience that Arizona has built since its first go-around against the Blue Devils.
As Love said in not so many words, bring it on.