Related articles:

Challenging time for Arizona

Other articles by Bruce Pascoe:

UA's 3 of a kind beats Jacks Arizona Wildcats Basketball: UA beats NAU 74-57 NAU coach happy to take his lumps, play at McKale Cats catch break with mediocre schedule 4 games into season, Budinger displaying clear leadership skills Cats on brief break from hoops, but not mentally Arizona 69, Santa Clara 66 Loss is Santa Clara's fourth close one this year Judkins, in starting debut, blossoms as forward option Horne plays, sounds fine in Georgia

General
CORT
Warehouse Supervisor Health Care
Rio Salado College
PA's/Online Instructors Construction
Komatsu Equipment Co
Mechanic General
CORT
WAREHOUSE/DRIVER Education
Assessment Technology, Inc
Social Studies Content Writer

The Wildcats began a season-high break of seven full days between games Sunday, which basically meant next to nothing.

Hard-nosed Kevin O'Neill is running the show, after all. So there will be no two days off, no cruising through finals week with a minimum of basketball, no kicking back whatsoever.

Instead, the Wildcats flew home Saturday night, following a 78-72 win over Illinois in Chicago, took Sunday off for a slight breather and are scheduled to go back to work today.

Hard.

"We're practicing the rest of the week," O'Neill said. "We've got to get better and that's something we're going to do."

O'Neill said he wants to use the time between today and a Sunday game against Fresno State to have his offense work against zone defenses, which the Cats haven't done much, and several other things.

But the biggest problem the Wildcats are facing lately cannot be easily replicated in practice. Arizona must figure out how to get through the early minutes of games without turning the ball over repeatedly, making silly fouls and sometimes getting fatally far behind.

Whether it is a result of over-anxiousness, starting lineup personnel or something else is not entirely clear. The Wildcats just know it happens too often.

"I don't know what it is," guard Jerryd Bayless said. "We just need to figure it out and definitely correct it. We need to do that."

Already, early sluggishness cost the Wildcats in close losses to Virginia and Kansas. It nearly came back to haunt them again Saturday against Illinois, when Arizona turned the ball over seven times in the first five minutes while spotting the Illini a 12-point lead.

Early deficits "don't mean anything to us, but we can't start like this every day," forward Chase Budinger said. "It's going to kill us in the end. We've got to find a way to start off better than we been doing."

Although the Wildcats have been smoother offensively when Nic Wise has been running point guard, and Bayless is free to work off the ball, O'Neill said he doesn't want to insert Wise into the starting lineup and immediately move Bayless off the point because of what Wise brings off the bench.

"He's done a wonderful job of energizing us," O'Neill said. "He settles us down. We had eight turnovers in the first nine possessions and only nine the rest of the way."

The early deficits also have prompted the Wildcats into developing a kind of tenacity that they didn't always have last season. While they struggled early against North Carolina last season and then fell completely apart in the second half, the Wildcats came back to beat Texas A&M after trailing by 20 in the first half on Dec. 2.

Budinger said the Wildcats' near-comeback from early struggles against Virginia helped them develop the mentality to take it a step further.

"We're more mature now," Budinger said. "We've been in this position before. We've experienced being lazy and coming back. The Virginia game was kind of a learning lesson for us."

Senior guard Jawann McClellan, who has experienced a heartbreaking Elite Eight loss and two first-weekend NCAA tournament exits over his UA career, says the Wildcats also are developing some courage.

It's the kind of inner strength Arizona inevitably will need to survive its remaining rough nonconference games, including a Dec. 19 game at UNLV and a Dec. 29 date at Memphis, and the rugged Pac-10 schedule.

"We showed a lot of heart," McClellan said. "We came from behind to beat two good teams the last two games. K.O. always stresses that you need to win by one point every game. That's what we try to go by. We knew what we had to do."

● O'Neill said Sunday he still has no plans to add another assistant coach for the rest of the season.

"I'm going to stick with what we have," O'Neill said.

● Budinger's elbow, which he injured while taking a charge in overtime Saturday, was examined Sunday. O'Neill said he wouldn't know anything more until today.