Arizona men’s basketball: Wildcats show their youth in loss to Lithuania ‘B’ Team

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.

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“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.”

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/arizona-men-basketball-wildcats-show-210000884.html

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Publish date : 2026-08-19 21:00:00

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