Since Tommy Lloyd took over the program in 2021, Arizona’s conference tournament results have been almost as good as the ones during the regular season. The Wildcats won the Pac-12 Tournament his first two seasons, before losing in the semifinals in 2024, then last March they reached the Big 12 final.
The UA is 10-2 in conference tourney games under Lloyd, an .833 win percentage and slightly better than his overall .801 win percentage in recording the most victories (141) by a Division I coach in their first five seasons. Arizona has also won two of the three preseason tourneys they’ve competed in, including the 2022 Maui Invitational.
“If you put us in a tournament, I guess I’m a sucker for it, I’m going to try and win it,” Lloyd said last week.
The UA will be trying to become the 13th school in Big 12 history to sweep both the regular season and conference titles. Houston did it last year, parlaying that into a trip to the national title game, and the Kansas squad that swept both in 2022 won it all while the 2018 Jayhawks reached the NCAA finals.
Here’s what to watch for when the Wildcats compete at the Big 12 Tournament in Kansas City:
The potential path
As the No. 1 seed, Arizona (29-2) earned a double bye and didn’t learn its first opponent—No. 8 UCF—until less than 24 hours beforehand. The Wildcats played the Knights (21-10) back in January, in the fifth game of Big 12 play, and won 84-77.
The film from that game won’t matter nearly as much as what came from Wednesday’s Big 12 second round overtime win over Cincinnati.
“Whoever we play, it’s going to be on a quick turnaround for them,” Lloyd said. “From my experience in these tournaments, there’s not a lot of things you can do different from Wednesday to Thursday. So we’ll get a good feel for the teams, and we’ll see how much they’ve changed over the course of the season. But yeah, it’s been a few months since you played them, but at least we played them. So we have that experience.”
Win that first game—which for history’s sake is important, because no NCAA Tournament champion has failed to win at least once in their conference tournament if one existed that season—and the Wildcats will play either No. 4 Texas Tech (22-9) or No. 5 Iowa State (26-6) in Friday’s quarterfinals.
Tech beat Arizona at McKale Center on Feb. 14, but that was with JT Toppin, who has since been lost to a knee injury. The UA clinched the Big 12 regular season title against Iowa State on March 2.
No. 2 Houston (26-5) and No. 3 Kansas (22-9) are the most likely matchups for Saturday’s Big 12 final. Any teams ranked in the top 50 in NET will count as another Quad 1 opportunity, not that Arizona needs any more since it is tied with Duke for the most in the country at 15.
The player usage
It was a bit of a surprise to see Lloyd stick with his 8-man rotation in the regular season finale at Colorado, especially since the game had no bearing on Arizona’s conference tourney seed and likely wouldn’t matter to its NCAA Tournament resume. Yet no one else logged time in that 89-79 win and the starters combined for 132 minutes, including 35 apiece for Jaden Bradley and Koa Peat.
That was not the intended plan, Lloyd said.
“I was gonna play more guys, and then I saw we came out flat, and I was like, no, these dudes are gonna wear this,” he said. “They’re either gonna figure it out, okay, and we’re gonna regain our rhythm and find a way to win this game, or we’re going to lose. But I’m not going to give these top eight guys any excuses.”
Lloyd didn’t feel it was fair for guard Evan Nelson and forward Sidi Gueye, who played key minutes during the stretch when Arizona was without Peat and Dwayne Aristode, to bear the burden of a poor performance.
“They don’t deserve that scrutiny, because I haven’t given them enough opportunities to put the pressure of winning and losing on their shoulders,” Lloyd said. “When we’ve asked them to help us in small bits, they have, but those top eight dudes were going to figure it out, or they weren’t, and we and we were going to learn from that experience one way or another.
“You got to use every opportunity you can to learn and teach. So I felt like that would be a much more powerful teaching moment for us. And I didn’t feel like we were at the risk of injury or running our legs out so we couldn’t play on Thursday. I didn’t see that happen. And so I was like, let’s figure this out. And I’ll give our guys credit, they figured it out the second half. And it was a great response to, if you don’t come ready to play, you got to be able to flip that switch. That’s going to happen sometimes. And our guys did that. But on the same token, come ready to play.”
That was one game, after having five days off beforehand and with four days off after. In Kansas City the UA could play three games in three days, with each one likely to be tougher than the previous. With that in mind, spreading out the minutes a little more figures to be part of the plan at least in the first contest.
“Let’s just see how the games go,” Lloyd said.
Whatever the case, don’t expect Lloyd to treat the Big 12 Tournament like an exhibition.
“I’m going to try to win it one game at a time,” he said. “It’s not going to be much more complicated than that. We’re not going to go to Kansas City and just kick it so we can come back home a couple days early. If we lose, we’ll come back and we’ll regroup and get ready for the NCAA tournament.”
Freshmen records could fall
Brayden Burries is coming off a 31-point performance at Colorado, the most by a UA freshman since Bennedict Mathurin had 31 at Oregon State in 2021. Mathurin didn’t get to play in the Pac-12 Tournament that season, as Arizona self-imposed a postseason ban.
Freshmen were not a big part of the Wildcats’ rotation in Lloyd’s first four seasons, with KJ Lewis’ 15 points against USC in the 2024 Pac-12 quarterfinals the only first-year player to score in double figures in a conference tourney. Carter Bryant had a combined 18 in three Big 12 Tournament games last March.
The UA should have multiple freshmen score 10+ on Thursday, as Burries (16.0) and Peat (13.4) average that many while Ivan Kharchenkov (9.8) isn’t that far behind and Dwayne Aristode scored 12 or more three times in nonconference play.
Deandre Ayton has the school freshman conference tourney scoring record, dropping 32 in back-to-back games in 2018. It’s been even longer since a UA freshman hit more than two 3-pointers in a conference tourney game, when Lauri Markkanen hit four twice in 2017.
2026 Big 12 Tournament schedule
(all times PT)
Second round (Wednesday)
No. 5 Iowa State 91, No. 12 ASU 42
No. 8 UCF, No. 9 Cincinnati 56 (OT)
No. 10 BYU (22-10) vs. No. 7 West Virginia (18-13), 4 p.m. (ESPN2)
No. 14 Oklahoma State (19-13) vs. No. 6 TCU (21-10), 6:30 p.m. (ESPNU)
Quarterfinals (Thursday)
No. 5 Iowa State (26-6) vs. No. 4 Texas Tech (22-9), 9:30 a.m. (ESPN)
No. 8 UCF (21-10) vs. No. 1 Arizona (29-2), 12 p.m. (ESPN)
BYU/West Virginia winner vs. No. 2 Houston (26-5), 4 p.m. (ESPN2)
Oklahoma State/TCU winner vs. No. 3 Kansas (22-9), 6:30 p.m. (ESPN2)
Semifinals (Friday)
Iowa State/Texas Tech winner winner vs. UCF/Arizona winner, 4 p.m. (ESPN/ESPN2)
Quarterfinal 3 winner vs. Quarterfinal 4 winner, 6:30 p.m. (ESPN/ESPN2)
Championship (Saturday)
Semifinal winners, 3 p.m. (ESPN)