SAN DIEGO – Arizona guard Dalen Terry lobbed up the basketball toward the rim and watched his 7-foot-1 teammate swoop in, grab it out of the air and dunk it, prompting Terry to whirl around and flash his teeth in a gleeful grin.
This was in the second half of their victory Friday in the first round of the NCAA men’s tournament. Despite the stakes of the moment, Terry looked loose. So did his teammate, Pelle Larsson, who turned around and pumped his arms in triumph after he sunk a 3-point shot later in the same game.
“Showing emotion has always helped us throughout the year,” said Larsson, a sophomore guard from Sweden. “And so I just try to get the crowd going and my teammates.”
This is trademark Arizona basketball this season – loose, emotional and flying high in pursuit of its first national championship since 1997.
It’s been quite a ride so far for the No. 1 seed in the South Region. The Wildcats have a first-year coach who has won 33 of his first 36 games. They even have players from eight countries who speak 10 languages.
But there’s also a bit of dread lurking in the background, seemingly ready to spoil the fun once it’s finally over. Arizona remains under the cloud of unresolved NCAA infractions case that predates the reign of Arizona’s current players and coach, Tommy Lloyd. It helped get their previous coach fired last year. And now the hammer could drop on the current team after the tournament, possibly including a future postseason ban.
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“When I took this job, I knew what I was stepping into,” Lloyd told USA TODAY Sports Saturday.
It wasn’t all bad by any stretch. To the contrary, Lloyd inherited a roster loaded with enough talent to reach the Sweet 16 after surviving a scare against TCU here Sunday in a second-round overtime game 85-80.
Here’s a look at who they are, how they’re rolling and what might happen beyond their March moment as they prepare to play Houston in San Antonio on Thursday.
Tongues, arms and hands aren’t just for talking and shooting basketballs at Arizona. They’re for celebrating and hyping the crowd.
In a game in January against Washington, Arizona guard Kerr Kriisa, a sophomore from Estonia, stuck out his tongue in proud reaction to his assist on another alley-oop dunk.
Earlier this month, Terry, a sophomore from Phoenix, raised his arms over his head and gestured to fans after dunking on UCLA in the Pac-12 Conference championship game.
On Friday, Bennedict Mathurin, a star from Montreal, joyfully threw his arm in the air after sinking a 3-pointer in the first-round win against Wright State.
A reporter asked them about this kind of behavior before the tournament:
“Do you win a ton of games because you’re cocky, or are you cocky because you won a ton of games?”
“It’s our personality,” Terry replied. “Stuff like that gets us going. It’s nothing we do on purpose, just it’s part of the game. Me doing whatever I do and Kerr doing whatever he do, it’s another edge for our team to keep winning.”
Of the 13 players listed on Arizona’s roster this season, only three are from Arizona – Terry and two non-scholarship players. The rest are from Cameroon, Mali, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, France, Montreal, Seattle and Virginia.
The Arizona media guide also lists all the languages they speak – French, Spanish, Creole, Wolof, Swedish, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Bambara and English.
With so many players from so many places, sometimes it’s hard to remember who speaks what.
At a news conference Saturday, Terry had to ask his teammate seated next to him, Azuolas Tubelis, what language he spoke besides English. Eight players speak at least two languages, according to Arizona.
“Lithuanian,” said Tubelis, a 6-foot-11 forward whose brother also is on the team.
“He and his brother speak that sometimes, but I didn’t even know what the language was,” Terry said. “It’s just funny to me when they talk in that language because I can’t talk in a different language for them not to understand me.”
Lloyd, the coach, brought in only four of the 13 players on this roster after being hired in April 2021, including Larsson, a transfer from Utah, guard Justin Kier, a transfer from Georgia, and Oumar Ballo, a 7-foot transfer from Gonzaga.
The rest of the roster was inherited from or signed by coach Sean Miller, who was fired after 12 seasons earlier that same month under of the shadow of the same pending infractions case.
Miller went to three Elite Eights in seven NCAA tournament appearances since his hiring in 2009. He also brought in all of those international players who played such big roles this season at Arizona, including Mathurin, the Pac-12 player of the year, and 7-foot-1 starting center Christian Koloko from Cameroon, who led the Pac-12 Conference this year with 92 blocked shots.
But it turned out to be a perfect match for Lloyd, who played professionally in Australia and Germany before becoming a longtime assistant at Gonzaga, where he had coached since 2001.
“I love international players,” Lloyd said. “And it will probably hopefully always be a foundational piece of any program I’m involved with. I think they have a certain basketball IQ and unselfishness that they naturally play with. And when you put a group of them together and you mix in some American kids, it becomes easy.”
Lloyd said he loves international players because they’re accustomed to being role players and playing against men who are older than them.
“Those men (overseas) don’t let you just dribble the ball around and jack crazy shots,” he said. “They make you set screens, block out and do all the little things. Those kids come over (to the U.S.) with maybe a little better natural understanding of how to contribute to a team without scoring.”
The scoring is spread around at Arizona, with four players averaging at least 9.9 points per game, led by Mathurin who is averaging 17.8 and rang up 30 against TCU. The Wildcats rank in the top 3 nationally in field-goal percentage (49.6%) and assists per game (19.8).
“Everybody touches the ball, everybody gets off, and everybody eats,” Terry said of Arizona’s offense.
Defensively, Koloko has helped them rank in the top 8 nationally in defensive rebounds per game (30.1) and blocked shots per game (5.8).
Connecting with those from other countries is “something that me and my staff are really comfortable with,” Lloyd said. He also said he and his wife are “really comfortable” with “dealing with guys from all over the world and kind of embracing it.”
The case became public on Sept. 26, 2017, when the U.S. Justice Department announced the arrests of 10 people, including four college assistant coaches. They were accused of accepting bribes in return for steering college players under their control to “corrupt” financial advisors.
One of them was Miller’s assistant coach, Emanuel Richardson, who eventually pleaded guilty to accepting about $20,000 in cash bribes from athlete advisers in exchange for steering Arizona players to those advisers. He was sentenced to three months in prison.
In 2019, federal prosecutors also played a wiretapped phone call in court that suggested Miller was breaking NCAA rules by paying then-Arizona star Deandre Ayton $10,000 per month.
Miller denied the accusations and recently was hired as coach at Xavier. But Arizona took the case seriously enough to self-impose a postseason ban last year in men’s basketball. The question is whether that will be deemed enough punishment in a case that accuses Arizona of lack of institutional control.
The NCAA infractions case is now being handled through Independent Accountability Resolution Process, which includes independent investigators, adjudicators and others who are responsible for reviewing select infractions cases in Division I. More penalties could be in store for Arizona and others, including Kansas.
“The administration’s been 100 percent transparent,” Lloyd said Saturday. “And no one in the program had anything to do with what had transpired before. For me, I would say this: I want to do a good job for these guys, give them a chance to go to the NCAA Tournament. I was certain for this year we would be fine.”
Next year is less certain.
“I feel good moving forward that Arizona has been proactive in making sure we’re going to be tournament-eligible long term,” he said. “So that was my main focus is making sure this year, these guys – they’re a great group of young men – and (make sure) they get the opportunity to experience this tournament.”
The run continues in the meantime, as long as it lasts. Before the tournament, he said he stressed to his players how he wanted them to play: Have fun.
“Come out aggressive” he said. “Let it rip.”
Follow sports reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. E-mail: [email protected]

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