Wasn't hard to figure what was on Sean Miller's mind at today's news conference at McKale.
On seven different occasions, many that were not prompted by a question, he spoke of his team's turnover troubles. Often humorously.
A sample:
"Double dribble is something that my (10-year-old) son Braden knows. You dribble once and you can't dribble twice.
"If you take the ball out of bounds with three seconds to go before the end of the second half, you've always got to watch throwing it to the other team. You don't want to give them a layup. You want to catch the ball with two hands. We have a couple of guys if they were catching Frisbees right now they'd be 1 for 3, 1 for 4 every time that thing came out of the air."
And this:"We can't catch the ball right now when the weather is warm. I can only imagine when the air is thin. You wonder if double dribble is going to happen or whether guys are going to move their pivot foot because the air is thinner but we're going to find out. We're going to try (in practice) today and tomorrow to emphasize taking care of the ball, going to foul line with confidence and make sure that everybody's rock solid in what they do.
"Layups - we want to make them. We don't want to travel. We want to catch with two hands and identify that our jersey will be blue and we want to throw to that blue jersey, not the white one. I know Colorado sometimes wears gray so I'll make sure to tell our guys that gray and blue is different and we want to throw to that blue team.
"It's hard to have fun doing anything in college basketball when your team is as inept at taking care of the ball as we have become."
--
Having already resigned himself to Kevin Parrom producing less than he did as a sophomore, Miller suggested Parrom might have benefited from a redshirt season.
Parrom's production has not increased since he returned in November from gunshot wounds suffered in September.
"Kevin hasn't contributed much to this year's team. He's gone through an awful lot. ... But we're in the middle of January and trying to get the most out of him that we can, which isn't much to this point.
Miller was asked if it has been therapeutic for Parrom to at least be playing with the Wildcats.
"I don't know if anyone can really walk in his shoes," he said. "It's so difficult the tragedies he's worked with. It's difficult on him. In hindsight, none of us had a crystal ball but a redshirt, we could have made the argument, would have served him well."
--
Utah has a Pac-12 win over Washington State and has lost two other conference games by a total of seven points.
"They're playing teams a lot tougher," Miller said. "Cal got them ... but if you look at their game at Stanford and the Washington schools, they played those teams extremely tough. They're improving, they're getting better. Anytime you play close games, it gives you a sense of confidence that they can come in the game and have an opportunity to win."
Then, immediately, Miller added this:
"And when we walk in it's not like the other team can't eat or sleep because they're worried. When they see us coming in we're not striking fear in anybody."
Please Wait…