What Sean Miller said after Arizona’s win at Stanford

Stan Szeto-USA TODAY Sports

The Wildcats fit his definition of a “great team”

The Arizona Wildcats won their 20th straight over the Stanford Cardinal on Saturday, winning 69-60 to pick up their second road sweep of the season. No other Pac-12 team even has one.

Our full recap can be found here, and here is what Sean Miller had to say on his postgame radio show. We will update this if more quotes become available.

On the win: “It was a testament really to our growth as a team because after a couple tough losses and a number of games this year, one of the things that I’ve really talked a lot about is no matter how hard we try to play our style, there is another team playing and once in a while, the other team can dictate the style. And then sometimes even within the framework of things you do well, you have a night where you don’t shoot it well, or a night where you turn it over, a night like tonight when we got in foul trouble. But the definition of a great season is, ‘are you still able to win when some of those things occur?’ There are times when those types of things have dismantled us and not allowed us to be the winner at the end. But tonight we really stayed with it, and not just one player but really everybody.”

On Nico Mannion, who went 2 for 10 from the field: “I thought Nico had a couple of tough calls against him but, again, when you have somebody as important as Nico on the bench with four fouls, a lot of teams will go south. And I thought Jemarl Baker during that period of time was a steadying force. We played some really good basketball in a tough stretch for our team.”

On holding Stanford to 32 percent shooting in the first half: “Our defense is improving. I think we felt that way as far back as three weeks ago. But one thing about defense on Thursday night, when we play Oregon State, we gotta start all over again and gotta do it again. And there have been a number of times our defense really looks the part, and then you get into a next week or next game, and we pick and choose. But on this trip our defense was very good against Cal, and it was excellent tonight. Our defensive rebounding percentage tonight was 89 percent. That means that Stanford got 11 percent of their misses back. And we made them miss quite a bit, so when you outrebound the team 39 to 25, and they have three second shots when they shoot the percentage they shot, it’s hard to lose and I thought that was the reason we won.”

On Zeke Nnaji having 21 points and 10 rebounds on 10 shots: “He played against a hard trap on every low-post catch. And once we got through really in the first half I thought everybody kind of settled in but Stone (Gettings) did a good job against the post trap. I think the frustrating part for us is out of our 21 3s, we missed eight or 10 that I would say there’s nobody within eight feet of the shot.

“But to be able to when we have a shooting night like that, I think the other concern is just making sure that we keep working on our shooting and take good ones because we’re a much better shooting team. than we’ve shown. We have these stretches where the ball doesn’t go in. Tonight was an example of being able to overcome that and still win.”

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