KANSAS CITY, Mo. — This is why the Big 12 should never gimmick up its men’s basketball. It’s too good in its pure form. Let the teams play in the proper conditions, and the product sells itself.
Arizona 82, Iowa State 80 in the Big 12 tournament semifinals, played on God’s own hardwood, was the best game of this 2025–26 season, anywhere. It was fine art, high drama and raw emotion. It ended on a well-defended buzzer beater by Jaden Bradley that spilled the Wildcats’ bench into a delirious dogpile right in front of the school cheerleaders. Boffo ending.
COURTSIDE VIEW OF ARIZONA'S BUZZER BEATER 🚨 pic.twitter.com/TNcXZnu6Bc
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) March 14, 2026
And if you ask the winning coach, Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, this brilliant game was elevated by the conference’s decision Thursday night to ditch the fiberglass light-up court it had been using in favor of a traditional floor for the final two rounds.
“I want to give credit to [Big 12 vice president of men’s basketball] Brian Thornton and [commissioner] Brett Yormark,” Lloyd said. “To have the courage to try something new and then even the bigger cojones to change it, it really made a difference tonight. … Just getting these guys playing on a surface they’re comfortable with, I think it allowed for a platform for a beautiful basketball game to happen tonight.”
The Big 12 needs Yormark’s adventurous spirit to bolster its football, which is swimming upstream for respect and revenue. Men’s basketball? Not so much. This isn’t a product in need of innovation. The Big 12 has been the best conference in the country more often than not in the last decade, with the additions of Arizona in 2024 and Houston in ’23 more than making up for the loss of Texas and Oklahoma.
The light-up court was a bad idea and, as Lloyd said, the conference leadership had the humility to admit it and fix it. That fits with Yormark’s work since he became the commissioner in 2022—he’s been willing to take big swings, but then change his mind at the behest of his conference membership. He wanted to add Connecticut as a league member, but backed down when the votes weren’t there. He wanted to play football and basketball games in Mexico City, but tabled those plans. He has explored a private equity venture, but for now that isn’t happening.
And on Friday, basketball fans came to the T-Mobile Center to see a masterpiece play out on a proper floor.
What they saw from Arizona and Iowa State was preposterously good. This was offensive basketball that, in the latter stages, approached the divine realm reached by Duke and Kentucky in 1992.
There were made baskets on the final 11 possessions of the game—seven of them 3-pointers, including a staggering six trips in a row. And that was against teams that excel at stopping opponents, with Arizona ranking third nationally in defensive efficiency and Iowa State fifth.
The last defensive rebound came with 4 minutes and 33 seconds remaining. After that, the ball was rebounded offensively twice and otherwise taken out of the bottom of the net.
“They were playing great,” said Arizona reserve guard Anthony Dell’Orso, who came off the bench to score 26 heroic points. “We were playing great. You enter into that kind of flow state. And guys just brought everything.”
“Down the stretch,” said Iowa State sharpshooter Milan Momcilovic, “it was bucket after bucket.”
This was the stretch run:
With 4:09 to play, Arizona’s Ivan Kharchenkov made a turnaround jump shot in the paint to give the Wildcats a 70–65 lead. Then the bombardment from deep began.
Momcilovic, who shoots 49.6% from three-point range (“the best shooter in the country, and I don’t think that’s debatable,” said Iowa State coach T.J. Otzelberger), swished a three from the top. Dell’Orso answered with one from the wing, and a glare at the courtside fans behind him.
After a Cyclones timeout, Momcilovic freed himself on a sideline out of bounds play for another three. Dell’Orso answered again, and glared again.
“I just see him shoot and it goes in,” says Dell’Orso. “I’m just thinking like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we got to come down and throw another punch.’ ”
Adds Arizona big man Tobe Awaka: “The way that Delly and Milan were going back and forth toward the end with the threes was absolutely insane.”
Then Iowa State forward Joshua Jefferson, a 34.5% shooter outside the arc, hit one. Arizona concocted a second-chance dunk for Awaka. That made it 78–74 Wildcats.
Momcilovic rose and fired one more time, this time off a baseline out-of-bounds set, the last of his 28 points on the night. After an Arizona timeout, Bradley pushed a drive inside the arc, cleared space with his body, and made a jumper. The lead was three.
Everyone in the arena knew Iowa State would look for Momcilovic one more time, and Arizona fouled him twice to keep him from getting the ball. With time draining, the weight of the game fell on the shoulders of heart-and-soul Cyclones point guard Tamin Lipsey, a senior shooting just 31% from outside the arc and 0 for 4 on the night to that point. Naturally, Lipsey stepped up and drained the game-tying shot with 15.2 seconds left.
The last shot would belong to Arizona. Lloyd did not call a timeout, not wanting to let Iowa State set its disruptive defense and trusting his personnel. One of the coach’s pet sayings is “FIO”—figure it out—and this was putting the philosophy into action.
“We practice a lot of figure-it-out situations,” Lloyd said. “And the players have got to kind of, in the moment, figure out the right plays to make with the right fundamentals. And when they do that—when they’re figuring things out, complicated things—we’re our best version of ourselves.”
Bradley, a fourth-year player and third-year Wildcat, was in charge—and he was keeping the ball. He waved his teammates out of the way and drove to the right wing, with Cyclones guard Killyan Toure dogging every dribble. Bradley rose, and Toure rose with him.
“Killyan guarded Bradley as perfectly as you could guard him,” Otzelberger said.
But Bradley got just enough space to flick up the shot, barely even following through. The clock expired and the backboard radiated orange while the shot was in the air. It splashed, a perfect ending to a near-perfect game that has no peer thus far this season.
This masterpiece was a far better statement on what the Big 12 is than any marketing gimmick could have been. The basketball was enough, on its own.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jaden Bradley’s Buzzer Beater in Arizona–Iowa State Proved the Big 12 Didn’t Need a Gimmick.
