Arizona has opened the 2024-25 season with a pair of lopsided wins, beating Canisius 93-64 and then crushing Old Dominion 102-44.

Things get a lot tougher starting Friday at Wisconsin, with Duke coming to town after that followed by the Battle4Atlantis in the Bahamas.

With two games in the books, here are five takeaways from those wins.

1. The Love, Lewis, and Bradley trio

In the first two wins for the Wildcats, all three starting guards had solid performances. Coach Tommy Lloyd has found a way to put all three on the court and have an efficient offense.

For Caleb Love, it is a year to prove that not only is he one of the best players in the nation, but he should have a shot at being an NBA draft pick. Against Canisius, he had 17 points, four rebounds, and six assists. Love would follow that performance with 10 more points against Old Dominion.

KJ Lewis is the energy guy out of the three guards. He comes in and makes timely plays. Having 14 points in the season opener, he would add eight more in the second game. Lewis’ playmaking comes on the defensive side. Between the two games, he has three steals and three blocks.

If Lewis is the defensive piece of the trio, and Love is the “do it all” piece, Jaden Bradley has been the offensive piece. He had 15 points against Canisius, and seven against Old Dominion.

Bradley also had seven assists in the two games. However, he is not just an offensive player. In the Canisius win, there was a sequence where he had a steal and score, and followed it with another steal and score off of the next inbounds pass.

2. Things get real now

Starting the season 2-0 is always a great thing to accomplish, but now Arizona is facing a tough stretch in their non-conference schedule. On Friday the Wildcats will make a trip to Madison to take on the Wisconsin Badgers. Last season Arizona beat Wisconsin in McKale Center.

A week later, they come back home for one of the biggest non-conference matchups at McKale Center in recent years. The Duke Blue Devils come to Tucson for the first time since 1991.

Last season, Arizona beat Duke in Durham 78-73. The Blue Devils have the potential number one pick in next year’s NBA draft in Cooper Flagg.

Between the two games, there is a good amount of time between each of them which gives the Wildcats needed time to reflect and fix.

“What it allows you to do is kind of go back and clean things up,” Lloyd said. “It allows you to revisit things you installed earlier in the fall. Then it gives you time to game plan your opponent.”

In the following five days, the Wildcats head to the Bahamas for the Bad Boy Mowers Battle 4 Atlantis. They will play Davidson in their first game and two more teams after that.

“Obviously we have a couple really big single games coming up, you got Wisconsin, you got Duke,” Lloyd said. “Both are going to be incredibly challenging, but what I got to have my eyes on too is, you got three games in three days that are going to be really hard in the Bahamas.

3. Free throw issues?

If there was one thing to critique in Arizona’s first two wins, it would be the performance from the charity stripe.

Going 19 of 27 in the opener may have just been due to first-game jitters. However, going 18 of 29 against Old Dominion is a bit concerning.

Getting to the free throw line has always been part of Lloyd’s offensive philosophy, but the amount of missed free throws has been something that has hindered the Wildcats at times.

Regardless of the percentage from the line, Lloyd is not worried about that aspect for his team.

“Well, we need to step up and make them,” Lloyd said on the free throw struggles. “We’re not going to make a big deal out of them, I think we’re going to be a really good free throw shooting team in time.”

4. Defensive tenacity

Even with scoring 90-plus points in both wins, one aspect that has been stout has been the defensive performance for Arizona.

The Wildcats combined to force 37 turnovers, which have led to 49 points. Arizona also has nine blocks and 24 steals.

Canisius was held to 43.1 percent from the field and Old Dominion shot 31.6 percent. Arizona is making it tough for teams to score. The Wildcats also held both teams scoreless through the first four minutes in the first half. Lloyd was unaware of just how good of a start the Wildcats usually have to start games.

“It’s great, I didn’t even know that, that’s great news,” Lloyd said. “I’ve really been on these guys to step it up defensively. I want more.”

5. Strong rebounding

Arizona has controlled the boards in both games this season as it has 102 rebounds. 17 offensive rebounds against Canisius and 24 against Old Dominion.

It’s not just going and getting rebounds, it’s the way the Wildcats are doing it. Grabbing the ball at the highpoint, finding a man and boxing him out, and not letting the ball hit the ground.

Tobe Awaka has been a driving force in that aspect, with nine rebounds in the first game and 15 in the second.

“Just get everything,” Awaka said on his rebounding mindset. “Coach has sort of been harping on us for rebounding with two hands. Making sure you go up with two hands forcefully and bring the ball down.”

If Arizona can continue this trend, it will lead to many more victories.

Arizona, famous for its extended post-election ballot count, on Saturday became the last state in the nation called in the 2024 presidential race. The Associated Press, CNN and NBC on Saturday affirmed that Republican Donald Trump won the state.

The news means Trump has completed a sweep of all seven battleground states, locking in a decisive Electoral College victory over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

The state’s 11 electoral votes give Trump 312 votes. Vice President Kamala Harris ended up with 226.

The former president, now president-elect, leads Harris by 184,935 votes statewide, with approximately 483,131 ballots still to be counted.

Trump secured his return to the White House on Wednesday morning, achieving a remarkable comeback following his 2020 reelection defeat.

He swept the seven presidential battleground states and improved on his 2020 margins in many places across the country to deliver a decisive victory.

He makes history as the second president in American history elected to serve two nonconsecutive presidential terms.

Contributing: Reuters

The problem with holding a election-night watch party in the mountain time zone is that by the time people start to roll in, the night will have already taken a turn. After racking up historic wins during the Trump era, Arizona Democrats entered the 2024 election hoping to keep the positive results coming. But at the party’s official celebration at an upscale hotel and conference center in north Phoenix on Tuesday, the mood started off anxious.

When I asked Mary Kuckertz, a mental-health professional from Tempe, how she was feeling, she used a term that to seemed to capture the spirit of the Democratic electorate: “Nauseously optimistic.”

At that point in the night, Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to victory was narrowing but still possible, and Kuckertz, a mental-health researcher, was thinking about what a second Trump term would mean. “So much funding got cut when Trump was president—all of these really phenomenal programs that we’re bringing these mental health services to children and families who really needed it, so many of those services have totally gone by the wayside,” she said. “I can’t handle more trans kids not getting access to basic human care.”

Arizona was the epicenter for the popular front against Donald Trump and his allies, and the people in the room were a reminder of what this coalition of moderate Republicans, Native Americans, Black and Latino voters, and college-educated whites had accomplished over the last eight years. Attendees heard from Gov. Katie Hobbs, who defeated election-denier Kari Lake two years ago; and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who defeated election denier Mark Finchem that same year; and Sen. Mark Kelly, who defeated Peter Thiel acolyte Blake Masters in 2022 and Trump-backed Rep. Martha McSally two years before that. The volunteers and organizers in the room had flipped a Senate seat in 2018 and knocked Sheriff Joe Arpaio from office in 2016. And on Tuesday, when almost everything else was looking grim, they had delivered a historic policy win—passing Prop 139, a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right to an abortion in the state to the point of viability. It wasn’t particularly close.

These were major accomplishments—the product of years or organizing and tactical ticket-splitting. There was another possible silver lining, too: Lake could lose again, this time to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who predicted victory in a speech last night, but cautioned supporters that it might take time for the race to be called. (It still hasn’t been.) Gallego, a Marine veteran who was raised by a single mother, would be the state’s first Latino senator, and he ran well ahead of the presidential ticket—particularly among Latino men. He succeeded less through any sort of anti-Trump messaging than through an aspirational pitch for the American Dream and working-class economic priorities.

The longer things went on, though, the more dissonant it seemed to hear Harry Styles and “Mr. Brightside” blaring over the speakers while Steve Kornacki pointed at an increasingly crimson map. (Pick a state—it didn’t seem to matter.) The crowd dwindled, and people started to hit the cash bar with a bit more purpose. 

When I asked Denise Deubery, who was watching the MSNBC feed, how she was feeling, she told me “the best way to put it is nauseously optimistic.”

The phrase was apparently catching on. But the meaning was a little different. The nauseous part was obvious, of course, but as the networks prepared to call more states that would narrow Harris’ path to victory even more, why was Deubery optimistic? It wasn’t about Harris’ chances, she said, but about the work that had brought them all there.

“I’ve never been amongst more encouraging individuals that I’ll probably never meet again in my life,” she said. She’d been volunteering since September. The fight gave her hope. It was the type of thing you could build on. “I’ve never been more of a proud American.”

By the time Fontes spoke, to officially wind the ceremonies down, there were more photographers than partisans on floor. “Wipe that frigging sourpuss face off of your face,” he implored anyone listening. Determined to put a positive spin on things, he noted the high number of outstanding ballots to count in Maricopa, and asked Democrats to be patient as results trickled in over the coming days.

“The last thing in the world I want to see out of my Democratic Party is a lot of pearl-clutching, a lot of hand-wringing, and a lot of naysaying,” he said. He wanted them to “continue moving forward with joy, whether or not you feel good about what Jake Tapper and the rest of those folks are saying on TV tonight.” Come morning, it was time to start curing ballots.

But there was no point in denying the obvious. 

“Lastly let me say this: If you’re going to drink: good—get an Uber or Lyft when you go home,” he said. “I want y’all to be safe, because we got a lot of work to still do.”