Women's basketball preview: Aari McDonald pushing pace, and pushing Arizona to new heights

Adia Barnes knew exactly what she was doing. 

When the Arizona women’s basketball coach took questions following the Wildcats’ 88-70 loss to Oregon in the Pac-12 tournament in March, she used an answer about another player to send a message to Aari McDonald, Arizona’s star guard. 

The question, regarding Oregon’s Sabrina Ionescu: “Coach, I was just wondering your thoughts on Sabrina's game and just how important she has been to basketball with her impact on and off the court?”

Barnes’ answer: “Sabrina is a phenomenal player. She's … one of the best point guards in the country. And I think she made the best decision of her life, and that was to stay in college.” 

Barnes might not have been speaking directly to McDonald, but the junior from Fresno heard her loud and clear. After a season in which she led the Pac-12 in scoring at 20.6 points per game, McDonald was mulling skipping her senior season and entering the WNBA draft, a decision Ionescu had considered after the 2018-19 season. Barnes thought the better choice would be to return to Tucson. 

“Oh, she knew that was said for her,” Barnes says seven months later. “And I’d been saying it all along.” 

The message worked. On March 29, still reeling from the cancelation of the 2020 NCAA Tournament, McDonald announced she’d return for the 2020-2021 season, promising fans, “the best is yet to come.” In coming back, the program’s first-ever first team All-American instantly put herself in the running for national player of the year. 

It was a strange offseason, to say the least. The halt in play was a much-needed break for McDonald, who estimates she spent the last few weeks of the season operating at 75% as she played through the pain of a stress fracture in her left fibula (lower leg bone). She went home to Fresno to rehab, returning to Tucson in May to start offseason workouts. She didn’t shoot a basketball for almost two months while she worked on getting healthy. 

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McDonald also used quarantine as an opportunity to sharpen her cooking skills, which has helped her eat healthier and save money. Her specialty right now is steak. Next she’d like to conquer grilling. 

The women’s college basketball season — albeit with a considerably shortened non-conference schedule — began just over a week ago for Arizona. The Wildcats are 3-0, ranked No. 6 in Tuesday's Paste BN coaches poll and own a victory over No. 11 UCLA.

McDonald’s quest to get Arizona back to the NCAA tournament is off to a good start. The Wildcats haven’t been in 15 years (16 if you count last year, though they were expected to earn a top 16 seed before the pandemic hit), and they haven’t been a power in women’s basketball since Barnes, the program’s all-time leading scorer, suited up for UA from 1994-98. 

Originally a Washington commit, McDonald followed Barnes to Arizona — Barnes spent five years as an assistant at UW, helping the Huskies to the 2016 Final Four — after her freshman year in Seattle. She’d grown close with Barnes during recruiting, and wanted to help her rebuild in Tucson. Potentially breaking her coach’s scoring record is just a bonus.

“I tell her all the time, if we didn’t have this COVID thing, I’d be so close to catching her,” says McDonald, who needs 752 points for the record. 

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Barnes gives McDonald credit for venturing into the unknown. 

“She knew we were going to be bad for awhile, and but she wanted to do something special,” Barnes says. As for coaching someone who could dethrone her as the best player in program history, Barnes calls it “awesome.” 

“We obviously weren’t good for a long time if I’ve had that title since I played,” she laughs. “When I first got here (to coach), no one even considered us, no one respected us. We were awful. But now, we’ve won the WNIT, the city is excited, we’ve got energy and momentum. To do it behind a player like her has been amazing.”

McDonald poses problems for opposing teams with her speed. On offense, she can get end to end faster than almost anyone in the country (she says she’s faster with the ball than without), attacking the rim with a relentlessness that exhausts defenders. On defense, her quick hands repeatedly disrupt passing lanes (she’s led the league in steals the last two seasons). 

She leads Arizona in scoring, assists, steals and minutes played.

McDonald is often compared with former UCLA standout and current WNBA champion Jordin Canada of the Seattle Storm, another speedy guard who excelled at both ends, and who considered turning pro early before ultimately returning. They’re different because Canada was crafty around the basket whereas McDonald is strong, often powering through contact. But it’s an apt comparison, says UCLA coach Cori Close, because their quickness sets them apart. 

“Defensively she is a nightmare, because she covers so much ground so quickly,” Close says. “And then there’s the other end. People used to say with Jordin that if she gets a defensive rebound or a quick outlet, the only hope to not give up a layup is to foul her. I never really understood, because Jordin was on our team. 

“Well, now I get it, because it’s the same way with Aari.” 

McDonald says she’s always been fast, and jokes she might have learned how helpful speed was a kid, because she was a troublemaker — “I’d be a little Picasso, drawing on walls,” she recalls — who often had to run away from scolding parents. 

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Speed she has down, so she focused this offseason on improving her assist-to-turnover ratio and shooting (she shot 28% from three last season; Barnes would like her to be at 35% but she's at 25%). Via Zoom, she watched hours of film with Barnes and assistant coach Salvo Coppa, studying how to make the right pass at the right time and with the right velocity. Barnes often tells her, “Yyou have to understand other people’s pace — not everyone can go as fast as you, so they can’t catch a hard pass going your speed.” 

But McDonald plans to keep pushing the pace, anxious to lead her team to new heights. Tucson is used to lots big basketball wins, though the men haven’t been to a Final Four since 2001. A trip to the women’s 2021 Final Four could serve as a balm for basketball-loving fan base hungry for postseason success. 

After all, this is exactly what McDonald had in mind when she decided to return for her senior season. 

“If I came back, I get better, I sharpen my game, I get my masters and then accomplish things we haven’t accomplished in awhile,” she says. “You can’t beat that.”