Arizona vs. Dayton: How the teams match up in the NCAA tournament

SALT LAKE CITY — The Arizona Wildcats are a win away from another Sweet 16, but talented Dayton stands in the way. Here's a look ahead at the second-seeded Arizona Wildcats' matchup with No. 7 seed Dayton in the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament on Saturday.

Probable starters

ARIZONA

G Kylan Boswell (6-2 sophomore)

G Caleb Love (6-4 senior)

F Pelle Larsson (6-6 senior)

F Keshad Johnson (6-7 senior)

C Oumar Ballo (7-0 senior)

G Koby Brea (6-6 junior)

F Nate Santos (6-7 junior)

C DaRon Holmes (6-10 junior)

How they match up

How they got here: Dayton went 14-4 in the Atlantic 10 Conference to finish in third place and lost to Duquesne in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament. The Flyers enter the NCAA Tournament with a NET rating of 23 and received the West’s No. 7 seed. The Flyers then returned from a 17-point deficit late in the second half to beat 10th-seeded Nevada in a first-round game Thursday.

Arizona went 15-5 to win the Pac-12 and finished 24-7 at the end of the regular season, beating USC but losing to Oregon in the Pac-12 Tournament. Given a No. 2 seed, the Wildcats beat 15th-seeded Long Beach State 85-65 in the first round Thursday.

Series history: Arizona is 2-1 against Dayton but hasn’t faced the Flyers in almost a quarter-century. The last two matchups were in Hawaii: Arizona beat Dayton 76-59 in the 2000-01 Maui Invitational and also 84-68 in the Hawaii Tip-Off tournament at Honolulu during the 1991-92 season. Dayton beat Arizona 74-68 in March 1951 in an NIT game at New York.

Dayton overview: With the versatile athleticism of big man DaRon Holmes and the third-best 3-point shooting percentage (40.2) in Division I, the Flyers have no trouble scoring. It’s on the other end of the floor where they have issues.

Dayton ranks just 70th in adjusted defensive efficiency, allowing opponents to score 100.5 points per 100 possessions. Dayton opponents shoot 48.3% from 2-point range (the 87th best defensive 2-point percentage) and 31.7% from 3-point range (the No. 52 2-point defensive percentage). They also don’t force many turnovers, with opponents turning the ball over on only 15.8% of possessions, though they don’t foul often — Dayton has the third-lowest ratio of opponent free throws attempted to field goals attempted (21.5).

Offensively, the Flyers not only hit 3s at a high rate, but they also take them at a high rate, ranking 32nd in ratio of 3s to overall field goals (44.5) and 22nd in percentage of points that result from 3s (38.2).

What’s more, in what might be a particular concern for Arizona, big guys are hitting a lot of those 3s — small forward Koby Brea is third nationally in 3-point percentage (49.7), power forward Nate Santos is 82nd at 42.5%, and even Holmes takes 21% of his shots from beyond the arc and hits them at a 38.0% rate. Holmes is even more effective inside, with his twisty athleticism helping him shoot 59.1% from 2-point range and he draws the sixth-most fouls of anybody in the country per 40 minutes played (7.5). Holmes hits 71.3% from the free-throw line when he gets there, too.

Dayton went undefeated at home, where it has sold out every regular-season game before the season even started for the third year in a row. It picked up early neutral-site wins over LSU and St. John’s and a road win at SMU, but was just 3-4 in Quad 1 games overall.

He said it: “They’re a really, really good team. DaRon Holmes is a fantastic player, a great young man. He presents a multitude of challenges. And then they have really good perimeter. They can shoot it, pass it handle it. So they present a lot of problems.

“Obviously the best thing you can do (against Holmes) is not letting the ball in the post and on the perimeter, you have to be solid and defending without fouling.

"They’re very set oriented, like Stanford, Washington State. A lot of teams in our league, run a set pretty consistently and so we've seen it.

"Brea is is a fantastic shooter, one of the best we’ll see. Santos is a great shooter. Kobe Elvis is a great shooter, but he's a great ball handler, creator. He's an explosive guard.

“Defensively) they held Nevada to four points in last eight minutes. That’s pretty good defense. They turned up the pressure, so we're not overlooking any aspect of their game.” — UA associate head coach Jack Murphy, who scouted the Flyers.

Key players

DAYTON — DaRon Holmes

The highest-rated freshman recruit ever at Dayton, ranked 38th nationally out of Goodyear Millenium and AZ Compass Prep, Holmes evolved into a second-team All-American this season with a sometimes-confounding ability to score inside, pick up fouls and even dart outside for 3-pointers. He’s a potential nightmare for an Arizona defense that has struggled with mobile, perimeter-shooting big men.

ARIZONA — Keshad Johnson

Dayton’s frontcourt shooters will likely keep the Wildcats’ top interior defender busy and helping center Oumar Ballo, who struggled on both ends when matched up against the big shooters of Stanford and Oregon State earlier this season.

High-altitude veterans

After spending his freshman season at Utah, and playing in Salt Lake City three other times with the Wildcats since then, Pelle Larsson has developed a theory on dealing with the city’s 4,300-foot altitude.

Don’t worry about it.

“I think it's all in the head, really,” Larsson said. “If think about it and talk about the altitude and how dangerous or whatever it is, it's gonna get to you. “Really, after that first media timeout, after six minutes or whatever, you kind of just get going in the flow and you catch up with your breath, and then it's kind of normal.”

The Wildcats had a chance to practice the drill last month, and they passed easily, beating Utah in triple-overtime and then going on to beat Colorado at the mile-high CU Events Center two days later.

So they knew what to expect Thursday against Long Beach State and Saturday against Dayton.

“The elevation it takes you two to three good minutes to get used to,” center Oumar Ballo said. “The first three minutes my chest was on fire, but after the first media timeout, I didn’t feel anything. You just have to stick with it.”

Lloyd the pest

Plenty of stories have been told this week about how Dan Monson gave Tommy Lloyd his entry into the coaching business by offering him a graduate assistant job at Gonzaga in 1998.

Only it wasn’t a job offer that was formally intended to carry over when Mark Few took over the Bulldogs in 1998, and Lloyd returned from a year of international travel and basketball.

“When Dan and I were going through the transition, about two or three weeks in, I called him,” Few said. “I said, `Muns, what the heck is the deal with this guy? He said, `You told him he could be a grad aide here.’ It was unbeknownst to me, and he's just kind of hanging out.

“At that time, Gonzaga wasn't as resource-rich as we are now. So I said, `Great.’ Then it just turned out to just be the greatest gift ever, right?

“Tommy's had a huge impact on our program and on us. Obviously the relationships, our wives are best friends, our kids are best friends.

Numbers game

10: Arizona wins in 12 NCAA Tournament games at Salt Lake City.

19: Double-doubles by UA Center Oumar Ballo this season.

61.5: Dayton’s winning percentage over “power five” conference teams (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, SEC and Pac-12) over the past 17 seasons, including a 2-2 mark this season.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona vs. Dayton: How the teams match up in the NCAA tournament