In the first leg of its Lithuania tour, Arizona’s youth, inexperience and lack of cohesion showed itself in a 99-88 loss to the Lithuania ‘B’ Team on Wednesday morning. A slow first half proved to be the difference with the Wildcats only scoring 37 points by halftime.
Arizona turned its performance around in the second half and got the deficit down to eight at different points. However, the Lithuania ‘B’ Team proved to be too much for the Wildcats to handle, and head coach Tommy Lloyd acknowledged
that.
“I thought (Lithuania) played really well tonight, they got off to a good start and their experience as basketball players showed,” said Lloyd. “This is a great learning experience for us. I put our team in a tough position. It didn’t matter if it was the A team or the B team. I knew it was going to be tough, and these players have a lot to prove and they’re good players.”
Sophomore forward Ivan Kharchenkov led Arizona in scoring with 25 points on 10-16 shooting. In his return to his home country, senior center Motiejus Krivas scored the first points of the game for Arizona but did not play much from there on out. Logging 11 minutes, he finished with 10 points and a very surprising zero rebounds.
As for the limited minutes, Lloyd knows that if Arizona is to repeat similar success as last season, Krivas will need to be healthy for what is a very long journey.
“We’re gonna go day by day with Mo,” said Lloyd. “Mo’s had a good summer, he’s obviously recovering from a small injury. I think he’s looking pretty close to 100 percent to me but we’re preparing for a long season and Mo is going to be a really important part of the season and you can when he’s on the court what a difference he makes for us and and he’s been limited in practice all summer, and really only started getting on the court with the team about a week or so ago. So we’ll see how Mo feels tomorrow and kind of build up. I wouldn’t expect him to play his normal minutes on this trip.”
The Lithuania ‘B’ Team was led by Matas Repšys who led with 24 points and drained four 3-pointers. It also had a 13-point performance off the bench from Titas Januševičius who added in two more threes.
Overall, it shot 49 presence from the field, went 24 of 35 from the line, and hit 11 threes. Arizona finished the game shooting 47 percent from the field, went 3 for 18 from beyond the arc, and went 17 of 28 at the free throw line.
Alongside Kharchenkov and Krivas in the starting lineup were freshmen Caleb Holt and Cameron Holmes, and sophomore North Carolina transfer Derek Dixon to make up the starting five. The Wildcats had 10 players who played for 5+ minutes.
Holt and Holmes finished with a combined 20 points going 8-24 from the field with 12 rebounds and seven assists. Dixon finished with 10 points shooting 5-12 from the field.
Nebraska transfer and Lithuania native Ugnius Jarusevicius came off the bench to score eight points going 3-3 from the field with four rebounds. Other Wildcats that saw the court included Bryce James, Evan Otten, Maksim Brnovic, Endurance Aiyamenkhue, and Addison Arnold.
Pregame, the Arizona men’s basketball Teitter account posted that JJ Mandaquit, RJ Godfrey, and Mabil Mawut would not be available for the game. Per Bruce Pascoe with the Arizona Daily Star, Mandaquit was out with a foot issue and Mawut had visa issues that did not allow him to travel with the team while Mandaquit is with the team.
Arizona will need to have short-term memory as it prepares for a very quick turnaround with a game set for Thursday against the Ukraine Senior National Team. The Wildcats will need to show that they can play close to 40 minutes of good basketball, not just 20 minutes.
“I didn’t schedule this trip for us to go undefeated,” said Lloyd. “We scheduled it to spend the time together and kind of start our culture build. We really haven’t even started our preparation for the season yet. So lots of respect for Lithuania, I thought they played really well today. I thought we were a little better in the second half, but they were too strong over the 40 minutes.”
Lloyd has made it very clear that the building of the culture for this team is paramount, which is why he wants to have his players prepared for any scenario. Despite the difference in FIBA style play, Lloyd just wants his players to start getting comfortable with their roles and wants the team to play good overall basketball.
“I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time preparing our team for the specifics of FIBA because we’re playing three games, and then we’re back to the basketballs we know it, and we got such a young team and so many players and new roles that I think our main focus needs to be on our main journey, which is building for the season,” he said.
Some teams may panic after a game like today, but with all the experience that Krivas has, he is confident that he and his teammates will turn their performance around. In his eyes it is not the end of the world.
“I feel like we knew what’s coming, but all of the players didn’t fully know what’s coming,” Krivas said. “We have a really young team. We play against pros, so, like the start was embarrassing, but it’s not a tragedy, and we have to come back to the hotel, get a good sleep, get recovery, and watch a lot of film and learn from it.”
