Arizona may have its full compliment of scholarship players available for Monday’s season opener against Canisius, something that wasn’t the case for either of its exhibition games or even the Red-Blue Showcase in early October.

Whether the Wildcats want to use all 11, though, is still to be determined.

UA coach Tommy Lloyd said sophomore center Motiejus Krivas, who missed both preseason games due to an ankle injury, has practiced this week and could be available for the opener. The 7-foot-2 Estonian was projected to be in Arizona’s starting lineup this season, and in his absence 6-foot-8 Tennessee transfer Tobe Awaka has started at the 5.

“I’m not gonna rush that thing,” Lloyd said Thursday about Krivas, who averaged 5.4 points and 4.2 rebounds in 12.1 minutes per game last season. “When he’s ready, we’re ready for him. If (trainer) Justin (Kokoskie) tells me he could play 25 minutes on Monday, I’d love to have him for 25 minutes. I want him back as soon as we can get him, as long Justin and the doctors feel like he’s built for the long haul, that’s the main thing I’m interested in.”

With Krivas out, Awaka has started with redshirt sophomore Henri Veesaar being first off the bench at center. Veesaar averaged 15.5 points in the two exhibition games, while Awaka averaged 13 points and 12 rebounds albeit against massively undersized competition.

Also seeing time in the exhibitions was freshman center Emmanuel Stephen, who in a combined 21 minutes showed both his upside and his rawness. It’s that latter trait that has made him a candidate to redshirt the 2024-25 season, a decision that Lloyd said has yet to be made.

“Like anything here, the player is going to have input,” Lloyd said. “We’ll let him make the choice.”

Using redshirts is something Lloyd has made no secret he’s in favor of, sitting out both Veesaar and Dylan Anderson last season though Veesaar’s redshirt was mostly due to a preseason elbow injury. Anderson has since transferred to Boise State, where he’s expected to start.

“I’m happy Dylan Anderson redshirted last year, I really am,” Lloyd said. “I’m so happy for him. He’s got three good years at Boise to make a huge impact. I would have felt horrible if he would have played and only played limited minutes and then burned a year and now he has only two years to play.

“I wish we would have redshirted Filip (Borovicanin) for him, I wish we would have redshirted Adama (bal) and those guys would have had another year. Anything you can do to lengthen those guys’ careers is a good thing.”

In order for Stephen to redshirt he cannot play in any regular season or postseason games, unlike in football where players can appear in up to four regular season games and still retain a year of eligibility.

“I think it would be great if they could come up with something in basketball,” Lloyd said. “I think eventually they’re going to have to. I mean, obviously football has done and it’s made sense. I just think for health and safety, for personal development. We’re coming out of an era where guys got five years of eligibility. What’s wrong with giving guys whatever, whatever you want to call it, four years plus nine games, whatever the ratio is?”

PHOENIX — Arizona’s secretary of state office must release a list of tens of thousands of voters who were mistakenly classified as having access to the full ballot because of a coding glitch, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Thursday.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ office initially denied a public records requests for the list that was filed by America First Legal, a group run by Stephen Miller, a onetime adviser to former President Donald Trump. Fontes’ office cited concerns over the accuracy of the list and the safety of the voters included.

Judge Scott Blaney said the court received no credible evidence showing the information would be misused or encourage violence or harassment against the voters whose citizenship hasn’t been verified. Blaney set a deadline of noon Monday for Fontes’ office to release a list of 98,000 voters and information Fontes relied on when announcing in early October that even more voters had been impacted — for a total of 218,000.

Arizona is among the most closely watched states given its presidential battleground status, and both campaigns have ramped up their presence in recent weeks to court undecided voters. The coding glitch doesn’t impact federal races. But it led to a decision from the state Supreme Court in September that the misclassified voters — representing about 5% of all undecided voters — still could vote the full ballot even though officials haven’t confirmed whether they are U.S. citizens.

That number of voters could tip the scales in tight local and state races, as well as fiercely competitive ballot measures on abortion and immigration. The voters are nearly evenly registered as Democrats, Republicans or with neither of those parties.

Fontes has said he has the list of 98,000 voters but not a more expansive one despite declaring many more were affected. His office said Thursday that it’s reviewing Blaney’s decision and weighing its options.

Blaney restricted Strong Communities Foundation and its legal counsel, America First Legal, from distributing information they receive from Fontes’ office ahead of Election Day on Tuesday to anyone but county recorders, the Arizona Senate president and speaker of the Arizona House and members of the elections committee.

America First Legal’s counsel, James Rogers, said in a statement Thursday that the group is hopeful the records could be used to verify the citizenship of voters on the list.

“It is unfortunate that Secretary Fontes so aggressively opposed our common-sense efforts to help restore trust in our state’s election system,” Rogers said.

The ruling also requires Fontes’ office to release communications and data transmissions with a number of government agencies, including the Arizona Department of Transportation and Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office.

The misclassification of voters from federal-only to full-ballot voters was blamed on a glitch in state databases involving drivers’ licenses and the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division.

Arizona is unique among states in that it requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Those who haven’t but have sworn to it under the penalty of law are allowed to participate only in federal elections.

The state considers drivers’ licenses issued after October 1996 to be valid proof of citizenship. However, the system coding error marked 218,000 voters who obtained licenses before 1996, mistakenly, as full-ballot voters, state officials said.

Traditionally conservative members of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Arizona are being turned off from former President Donald Trump, in part because of his language around immigrants.

With around 400,000 Mormons in the battleground state — roughly 6 percent of its population — both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have sought to win them over in the hope of securing Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes, but the key issue of immigration has become divisive.

Tyler Montague, a political consultant with the Public Integrity Alliance and a LDS member, told Newsweek that while many members of the church will vote for Trump, a growing number will either leave their presidential vote blank or swing all the way to Harris.

He pointed to LDS’ immigrant-friendly attitude, highlighted by the missionary programs many young Mormons take part in.

“A lot of them are in Latin America, a lot in Africa, Asia, so you have people exposed to these other cultures and other languages and they develop understanding and empathy,” Montague said. “So, you have a group that’s sympathetic toward immigrants, legal or otherwise.”

A growing discomfort around Trump’s immigration rhetoric

The Arizonan said that Trump’s rhetoric on immigration – promising mass deportations and characterizing migrants as criminals or those stealing jobs – did not sit well with those who had connections to countries where immigrants were from, or who worked and lived alongside them in their communities.

The Harris campaign has sought to tread a line between tightening border security, while also avoiding demonizing migrants writ large.

The LDS community in Arizona has voiced its opposition to anti-immigrant legislation in the past, including legislation in 2010 known as the “show me your papers” bill, which the church rejected parts around enforcement.

Some Evangelical Christians have also expressed discomfort around the lack of empathy for refugees and immigrants within the GOP, as Newsweek reported earlier in October, though the voting bloc is still expected to go for Trump by wide margins.

Are Mormons switching to Harris?

Montague told Newsweek that discomfort is going to matter among a group that sees voting as its civic duty, which could swing results in a state which was decided on around 10,000 votes in 2020.

“It’s not just the immigration issue. The culture of the church, the culture of Christ-like service-style leadership is just in contrast with the braggadocio style of Donald Trump,” Montague said. “That’s off-putting.

“The thing that keeps people in his camp, there are plenty of people that don’t like him, but they’re turned off by the abortion issue, which Kamala Harris is touting.”

Mormon support across the U.S. for Republican candidates has dropped in recent decades, according to the Pew Research Center in 2016, with George W. Bush receiving 80 percent support in 2004, compared to 61 percent for Trump in 2016.

That does not mean those votes are automatically going to the Democratic Party, though, with some feeling issues like abortion leave them with no viable presidential candidate.

Montague pointed to high-profile LDS members who could sway members of the church, including Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah who ran against Barack Obama in 2012, and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. Both Romney and Bowers have openly voiced their opposition to Trump.