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SALT LAKE CITY — If, on any random Monday morning throughout this college hoops season, you happened to be walking through the Arizona basketball office, you would eventually come upon something that so many fans and talking heads and social media lurkers would be surprised to see.

Caleb Love in his real element. Sitting in front of a big screen. Film flashing, his eyes moving. Every shot, every pick-and-roll read, every decision made, every decision not made. Love breaks it all down to an audience of one — Arizona director of player development Rem Bakamus. Love narrates, assesses, winces at mistakes. He speaks, Bakamus listens.

“His own harshest critic,” Bakamus recently explained. “No matter what everybody says, this and that, he’s always his own harshest critic. That’s what people don’t understand.”

What everyone says about Love has long been a universal subject. In a college basketball landscape that more and more seemingly lacks major stars with household names, Love is one of the few collegians out there to elicit visceral reactions. Good and bad, for a few years now. Everyone who watches Caleb Love play has an opinion about how Caleb Love plays.

And now, perhaps, comes the ultimate theatre.

Of all the delicious scenarios that could emerge this March, no plotline rivals the potential script of Love facing his former team, the North Carolina Tar Heels, in an Elite Eight matchup in Los Angeles. A few orders of business will need to come first in the Sweet 16 — Arizona handling Clemson, North Carolina handling Alabama — but such a screenplay is too tempting to not at least imagine. It was only two years ago when, from the nether regions of the bracket, Love served as the flamethrower in eighth-seeded Carolina’s string of wins over Marquette, Baylor, UCLA, Saint Peter’s and rival Duke to reach the national championship game. Love was both incredible and erratic, unleashing his brand of wild shot-making and heedless decision-making.

For as perfect as the run was, what followed was every bit as dramatic, for all the wrong reasons. A 5-of-24, four-turnover performance in a national title game loss to Kansas that was so colossally bad that no two eyes could ever unsee it. As was Carolina’s entire following season, when one of college basketball’s proudest programs became the first preseason No. 1 team to miss the NCAA Tournament since the field expanded in 1985. Love was, both understandably, and at the same time overly harshly, the primary scapegoat in the complicated story of that team’s vanishing act. It was both in his best interest and the program’s best interest for him to enter the transfer portal last spring.

Rarely does dissolution work out so well. Love landed at Arizona, was named Pac-12 Player of the Year, and led the Wildcats to a conference championship and a No. 2 seed. North Carolina, meanwhile, led by former Love teammates RJ Davis and Armando Bacot, won an ACC title and landed a top seed. Both sides, separately, happily ever after.

But then, two weeks ago, the Heels were the selection committee’s final No. 1 seed, landing in the farthest regional — the West — where Arizona was placed as the No. 2, and the possibility of an Elite Eight Epic with Love in the middle was immediately realized.

That, though, is still in the distance, and we’re far better off looking at what’s in the here and now.

Sitting in his Delta Center locker last weekend, Love peeled his Arizona basketball jersey after a second-round win over Dayton and talked about trying to figure out who he’s supposed to be. That is why he chose Arizona in the first place.

“The things that I didn’t know in the past, I’ve learned,” Love said.

He scored 19 in the win over Dayton, and 18 in a first-round win over Long Beach State, going 6-of-12 inside the arc, and 6-of-20 on 3s in the two games. Some were good looks, others were not. Against Long Beach, Love missed his first five 3s, including one when he chased down a loose ball with most of his teammates on the opposite side of the court, four Long Beach defenders in front of him, and 25 seconds left on the shot clock. Arizona head coach Tommy Lloyd responded to the absurd shot with a blank stare from the sideline. Against Dayton, Love was unstoppable early, scoring 13 of the Wildcats’ first 26 points, including three made 3s that built the Cats’ double-digit lead. Then came the other side, two completely unforced turnovers, including an attempted 30-foot overhead bounce pass through three defenders. Love was ultimately on the bench during his team’s decisive 10-0 run to fend off a Dayton comeback.

Thing is, that was fine by Love.

“At this point, all I care about is winning,” he said afterward. “I don’t care if I’m on the court, on the bench, or in the stands. I play Arizona basketball, and Arizona basketball ain’t about me.”

Which is why, even when there’s still that occasional wild shot or ill-judged moment, this is all working out.

Grabbing a box score in the locker room on Saturday, Arizona associate head coach head coach Jack Murphy pointed to one column.

Assists

5

“Same as against Long Beach,” Murphy said. “That’s the difference.”

Over his 136-game college career, Love’s teams are 38-5 when he has five or more assists, with 28 of those wins coming against high-major opponents or in the NCAA Tournament. He’s hit the five-or-more assist mark a career-high 13 times this season. Arizona is 12-1 in those games, 15-7 in the others.

“He’s bought into that,” Murphy said. “So everything else is just gravy. Because if Caleb is getting five assists, he’s not just focused on himself.”

This is what Love’s entire venture into the desert has been about. Evolution.

As a scorer and a shooter, Love is always going to be who he is. It’s his audacity that makes him great. He’s a tough shot-taker and a tough shot-maker. No one at Arizona has wanted to bottle that, and they haven’t. Per Synergy Sports data, a higher percentage of his jump shots this season have been contested, compared to last season, from 61.3 percent up to 68.6 percent. Difference is, he’s making more, going from 27.6 percent shooting on those guarded attempts last year up to 37.6 percent. That’s the nature of shooting.

What Love and Arizona have focused far more on is everything else.

Those video sessions with Bakamus amount to Love’s personal report card. Did he see the open man? Was that the right read? Did he force that action? On and on, clip after clip.

“There’s a balance, always, that he’s trying to find,” Bakamus said. “Sometimes he’s gotta understand when things are stagnant and he needs to go get us a bucket. Then he has to understand when to create for his teammates. I think he’s figured it out. He is dialed in on being a playmaker. He understands the game and he works his a– off. There isn’t much more you can ask for.”

None of this is lost on those around Love. Be clear, Arizona players were all too aware of what was coming when Love committed late last May. At least they thought they were.

Pelle Larsson was a key member of Arizona’s returning 2024 core of himself, Oumar Ballo and Kylan Boswell. He was home in Sweden when the coaching staff called to tell him they were speaking to Love after his recruitment to Michigan fell through.

“It kinda came out of nowhere,” Larsson remembers. “They told me how he’d fit in and how committed he was to the program. They were kind of, like, pitching it a little bit. I didn’t know what to think.”

Nor did Boswell.

“Honestly, before, I only knew what social media was feeding me — Caleb Love is a bad teammate, a distraction,” he said Saturday. “I was open-minded about him coming in, but I really didn’t know how this was gonna go. But the first day I met him, I was like, oh, this is gonna be fine.”

Love knew what they thought because he’s always known what everyone thinks. It’s been forever unavoidable. The backlash in the aftermath of North Carolina missing last year’s dance caused Love to scrub his social media accounts.

Perhaps now the record is being set straight. Love is an improved version of his former self, having found more method to the madness.

“People have had his narrative wrong the whole time,” Bakamus said. “He’s a winner. When he gets in that mode, and he’s playmaking, helping guys, there isn’t a better guard in the country.”

This week, be it against his old team or not, will be the ultimate test. If Love takes a second team to the Final Four, there won’t be many questions left about who or what he is.

That’s why Arizona took the chance in adding such a polarizing player. One of the challenges in building a team in the transfer portal era is deciding how big of a piece is needed to fit a hole. When it came to Love, the Arizona staff hoped it could find an alpha to play the part of Bennedict Mathurin from the 2022 team that went 33-4 and reached the Sweet 16. Adding Love raised the ceiling. Now it’s time to get there.

“He is,” Bakamus said, “exactly what you need in March.”

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(Photo of Caleb Love: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)