ASU Basketball: 2018 Pac-12 Tournament Preview
By Trevor Booth
An open field in this year’s Pac-12 Conference Tournament gives several teams the opportunity to advance to Saturday’s championship game.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
And we’re not talking about Christmas.
With two months of league play concluded, each Pac-12 team will now roam the deserts of Las Vegas looking to secure the conference’s automatic NCAA Tournament berth in a four-day free-for-all at T-Mobile Arena.
After wrapping up the regular season title Saturday night, the Arizona Wildcats will enter the tournament as the No. 1 seed for the third time in the past five seasons.
Trailing behind them is No. 2 USC, a team that had won four straight before falling to UCLA Saturday night.
The Bruins sit in a three-way tie with Utah and Stanford at the No. 3 spot in the conference. However, due to a tiebreaker, Utah will hold the third seed, followed by UCLA at No. 4 and Stanford at No. 5.
With things so top-heavy, it’d be expected that the champion would rise within the top five.
That assumption couldn’t be further from the case.
Trailing the 3-5 seeds by just one game are No. 6 Oregon and No. 7 Washington, who have experienced tournament coaches in Dana Altman and Mike Hopkins. Altman’s teams have advanced to the past two conference championship games, while Hopkins has seen plenty of title games behind Jim Boeheim at Syracuse.
And of course, there’s the case of the Arizona State Sun Devils at No. 9.
Yes, the days of ASU being the last undefeated team in college basketball are long gone, but they have the makeup required to make a deep tournament run. The Sun Devils are 3-0 in neutral site games this season, and with Bobby Hurley at the helm, experience is very much on their side.
If they find a way to get hot, a championship run would certainly fall in their sights.
It’s the beginning of March Madness, and things are about to get wild. Let’s take a look at each team and their opening round matchups in the Pac-12 Tournament.