UW Will Get Earliest Pac-12 Look at Tommy Lloyd as Arizona Coach

The Huskies and the Wildcats meet in their conference opener in early December.

Dan Raley | May 26, 2021

In a game fraught with newness all around, a near totally revamped University of Washington basketball team will open Pac-12 play next season on the road against Arizona and its recently hired coach Tommy Lloyd, the former Gonzaga assistant.

The two sides will meet in Tucson on Thursday, December 2, as part of an expanded 20-game conference schedule that was installed last season.

Three days later, on a Sunday, the Huskies will host its first Pac-12 home game against UCLA, which is coming off a Final Four appearance, at Alaska Airlines Arena.

The Pac-12 said it timed the release of these opening basketball dates for all of its members to coincide with the league championship football game in Las Vegas on that Friday, Dec. 3.

After turning in a gruesome 5-21 season, UW coach Mike Hopkins has added six newcomers this past offseason, gleaning bodies from the transfer portal, JC ranks and African amateur level. That's not counting promising top 35 recruit Jackson Grant, a 6-foot-10 big man from Olympia High school who joins the program after being committed for a couple of years.

Among the latest Husky roster adds is guard Terrell Brown, who spent last season with Arizona and played in 26 games and started nine, after transferring from Seattle University.

A Northwest native who played basketball for Kelso High School, Walla Walla Community College and Whitman College, Lloyd spent 20 seasons at Gonzaga as a trusted underling and ace recruiter for coach Mark Few. He was part of Zag teams who beat the Huskies in 7 of 8 meetings.

Lloyd similarly has been forced to restock Arizona's roster, which saw a significant amount of turnover once previous coach Sean Miller was fired. He's faced with rebuilding in the face of NCAA sanctions that could cripple his efforts and led to Miller's ouster.

In playing a 20-game conference schedule, the Huskies will play every team in a home-and-home series next season except USC in Seattle and Arizona State in Tempe. The Pac-12 will release the rest of the conference playing dates at a later time, plus non-conference games.

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Published May 26, 2021

DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.