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Rawle Alkins has sparked Arizona with his toughness, winning mentality
When Oregon snapped Arizona’s national-best 49-game home win streak 14 months ago, Sean Miller feared he had lost more than just a basketball game.
The Arizona coach worried that the five-star prospect visiting campus that day might lose interest after seeing the Wildcats beaten on their home floor.
To Miller’s surprise, that loss only made Rawle Alkins more eager to come to Tucson. Seeing the slumped shoulders, red eyes and devastated faces of the Arizona players proved to Alkins that he’d found a program that threw everything into the pursuit of winning rather than merely paying lip service to it.
“It was like someone had died, like their world had ended, Alkins said. “They never lost at McKale. Coach Miller thought he lost me in the recruiting process at that point, but I told him seeing that helped a lot.”
Crushing losses like that one have been rare for Arizona since Alkins’ arrival this season. The 6-foot-5 freshman is one of the pillars of a 32-win Wildcats team that dispatched of North Dakota and Saint Mary’s last week to reach the Sweet 16 for the fifth time in eight seasons under Miller.
A powerfully built yet athletic wing with the strength to finish through contact, Alkins averages 11.1 points for Arizona as a freshman, third most on the team behind Allonzo Trier and Lauri Markkanen. Alkins is most lethal bulldozing his way to the rim in transition, but he also is a capable playmaker, a 38 percent 3-point shooter and a good perimeter defender with the tools to someday be a great one.
The toughness and energy Alkins provides were especially apparent in the opening week of the NCAA tournament. In the first round against North Dakota, Alkins sank all eight shots he attempted and scored a season-high 20 points. In the second round against Saint Mary’s, Alkins fractured the index finger on his shooting hand yet returned to make maybe the biggest play of the game, baiting an opposing guard into throwing a lob and then ripping it out of the air to singlehandedly thwart a late 3-on-1 fast break.
“It takes one tough kid to pop your finger out midway through the first half on your shooting hand and play the rest of the game,” Miller said. As great as he played [against North Dakota], that says a lot more about Rawle. Anybody that’s played the game and has suffered a hand injury like that knows how difficult it is to do what he did.”
It’s no surprise to Alkins’ former coaches to see him emerging as a key player at Arizona. They describe him as a big-hearted kid who could impact a game in multiple ways yet cared far more about winning than his own stat line.
When Alkins returned to his native Brooklyn as a high school freshman after spending the previous two years in Florida, nobody in New York basketball circles knew much about him. Joe Arbitello, coach of renowned Brooklyn high school basketball power Christ the King, met with Alkins and his mother on the recommendation of a friend and invited him to enroll.
“Nobody’s ever going to believe this but I never saw him play,” Arbitello said. “The first workout, he takes a basketball, takes one step and windmill dunks it. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.'”
Already 6-foot-4 with a man’s physique early in his high school career, Alkins blossomed into New York’s top prospect by the end of his sophomore year and helped lead Christ the King to three straight city titles. He drew frequent comparisons to former New York phenom Lance Stephenson because of their similar styles of play, though otherwise Alkins was nothing like the famously selfish, entitled ex-Lincoln High School star.
In a Jan. 2015 rematch of the previous year’s state semifinal between Christ the King and Benjamin Cardozo, a foul-plagued, flu-ridden Alkins endured one of the worst games of his career and served mostly as a decoy down the stretch. Only because of the contributions of teammates Jose Alvarado and Jared Rivers did Christ the King manage to escape with a win.
“When we went downstairs in the locker room, instead of him having his head down after the worst game he played in front of 2,000 people, he was so happy we won and so excited for Jared Rivers,” Arbitello said. “I said in front of the team, ‘This is what makes you great. You better never lose this.’
“Most kids, I’d have to put them into therapy for a week. I’d have to deal with their mother or father saying they didn’t get the ball when they should. That was never the case with him. I’ve always said I’ll never coach another kid like Rawle in my life and if I do I’m the luckiest coach in America. He’s ultra-talented with no baggage.”
From Kentucky, to North Carolina, to Louisville, to Indiana, many of the nation’s elite programs were pursuing Alkins by his junior year at Christ the King. One of the few that wasn’t was Arizona, which successfully recruited New York before because of assistant coach Book Richardson’s ties to the state but wasn’t certain Alkins would have interest in coming to a Pac-12 school on the other side of the country.
“After his sophomore year, we were in a recruiting meeting and Damon Stoudamire said, ‘Hey Book, let me holler at you for a minute,'” Richardson said. “I know you probably know about him, but there’s this monster out of Brooklyn. He’s an animal.’ I said, ‘Yeah I know who he is.’ I had a lot of friends who kept calling and saying, ‘Book are you going to recruit him? I said, ‘He doesn’t want to come west.'”
Everything changed for Arizona when Miller watched Alkins play in person in July 2015 and anointed him a top priority for the Wildcats. Alkins had already narrowed his college options to 10 schools by then, but Miller was persuasive enough in a phone call to Arbitello that the Christ the King star soon made room for Arizona on his list.
When an issue stemming from some varsity games he played as an eighth grader in Florida forced Alkins to leave Christ the King after his junior season, his transfer to a North Carolina prep school turned out to fortuitous for Arizona. Christ the King had taught Alkins not to tolerate losing, but he sometimes felt players at his new school cared more about rankings or stats than wins or losses.
The more Alkins learned about Arizona’s program, the more it reminded him of what he missed about Christ the King. He forged an instant bond with Richardson because of their shared New York ties and Miller’s competitiveness and intensity reminded him of what he liked about playing for Arbitello.
Visiting Tucson for the Oregon loss sealed it for Alkins. Whether it was Miller confronting Kaleb Tarczewski on the bench for his lack of effort or Ryan Anderson apologizing to Arizona fans after the game for the team’s poor performance, Alkins realized this was a program that valued winning the way he did.
“When he saw how upset everyone was, it reminded him of Christ the King,” Arbitello said. “When we lose, it’s devastating to us. We act like babies. We can’t sleep. He got that same feeling that winning was important to everyone there.”
So while Arizona hated to lose that game to Oregon last season, the Wildcats should be glad they did. In losing, they gained a player whose talent, consistency and enthusiasm has helped this year’s team weather the 19-game suspension of Trier and the loss of Ray Smith to emerge as a serious threat to reach the Final Four.
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Jeff Eisenberg is the editor of The Dagger on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at daggerblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
