No. 17 UA hopes to get a Pac-10 win after three league losses in a row

One win.

That’s all Arizona thinks it will take to emerge from its shooting funk and losing streak.

One has created the other as the Wildcats take on Arizona State at 7:30 tonight at McKale Center.

“This is a game where we have to turn it around,” UA freshman Chase Budinger said. “Hopefully, we can come out Wednesday and have fun, get back to what we had been doing.”

He was referring to how well the Wildcats played together during a 12-game winning streak and top 10 ranking.

The Cats were shooting 52.7 percent from the field and 42.3 percent from the 3-point line two weeks ago.

Since then, those averages have fallen to 49.9 and 36.9, respectively.

Arizona has dropped to No. 17 in The Associated Press poll after losing three straight Pacific-10 Conference games for the first time since the 1984 season. Arizona has also lost four of five.

“When we were doing well, we sort of had a groove to us,” Budinger said. “We had an emotion and a nobody-can-beat-us attitude. We let that go away and we need to bring it back.”

ASU could be the perfect remedy. Arizona has a 10-game winning streak against the Sun Devils and has dominated the series.

Nevertheless, Arizona thinks of the game as a rivalry.

“As long as you’re in state, it’ll be a rivalry,” said Arizona forward Marcus Williams. “There is a lot of trash-talking and I know there has been some history with (ASU) fans getting on coach (Lute Olson). There is a lot of bad blood there.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Sports. Tags for this post: Basketball, High School, page-c05, Sports-Basketball, Sports-Basketball-High School, Steve Rivera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.