BOULDER, COLO. — Arizona lost its fourth game of the season in what head coach Sean Miller said was a lack of effort and desire to play for him as their coach that felt reminiscent of the Bahamas trip.
“You always want your team to play for you as the coach, and our guys, they really struggled playing for me, they really do,” Miller said. “It’s really hard to get our guys to run as fast as they can. That’s not them, that’s me. I have a hard time reaching our guys… I can’t reach them, I really can’t.”
Miller said he has never before had a team like this that did not want to play for him as their coach. He said he doesn’t know what to do at this point other than keep benching players that don’t play with effort.
“We’ll see,” Miller said. “We’ll either fix it or keep getting our asses kicked.”
Arizona lost three straight on a trip to the Bahamas for the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament during the non-conference schedule. During the three losses Arizona was slow on defense and struggled to take good shots on offense. Miller likened the effort he saw from the team in the Bahamas to the effort he saw Saturday.
“It was very similar,” Miller said. “You gotta get your guys believing and you gotta get your guys playing really hard, and you know, our guys really struggle to do both right now.”
Miller has been known as a defense minded coach, one that puts defense first and lets the offense run through the defense.
“If you have that team that really struggles to give effort on defense, its very easy, it almost makes perfect sense, that that same group will take ill-advised shots,” Miller said.
Despite what Miller said about his team, they are coming off of a nine-game win streak and still boast a 12-4 record with several notable wins against top 25 teams, such as No. 11 Texas A&M and No. 4 ASU.
Miller said it is his job as the head coach to get the team back on on track.
“I’m going to take all the responsibility,” Arizona head coach Sean Miller said. “Obviously when that’s the case it falls on you and we will have to see if we can fix it, because we have a long road ahead of us. It doesn’t get any easier.”
