When Jack Murphy flips through his passport, he is awash in memories and afflicted with confusion. “Here’s a stamp from Serbia, I think,” he says. “Or is that Latvia?” Flip. “Let’s see, this one is from Helsinki. I have a bunch from there and Frankfurt, because that’s where I connect a lot. I forget which visit that was.” Flip flip. “Here’s one from Estonia. I was only there for 10 hours.” Flip flip flip. “Okay, here you go. This is 18th of November in 2019. Mexico. That was my first time to go see Benn.”

Murphy apologies for the disorder inside his little blue booklet, but there’s no need. Those pages may present an intractable puzzle, but they also serve as a road map for how one of the more talented rosters in college basketball was pieced together. Since coming to Arizona as an assistant coach in 2019, Murphy has turbocharged the program’s international recruiting efforts. And if you think his passport is difficult to comprehend, you should try being in the Wildcats’ locker room sometime. Eight of the team’s 11 scholarship players hail from outside the U.S., and between them they speak 11 languages. Six of the eight players in Arizona’s rotation are foreign-born, including four starters – 6-3 sophomore point guard Kerr Kriisa (Estonia), 6-6 sophomore guard Bennedict Mathurin (Canada), 6-11 sophomore forward Azuolas Tubelis (Lithuania) and 7-1 junior center Christian Koloko (Cameroon).

The intra-planetary mix produces bouts of perplexity and bits of comedy. Like the time last fall when newly arrived freshman guard Adama Bal, who hails from Le Mans, France, held something up to Dalen Terry, a 6-7 sophomore from Phoenix, at a team meal and asked, “What do you call dees?”

Terry blinked and replied, “Uh, that’s definitely a fork.”

Once the games begin, however, the differences melt away, and Arizona becomes one nation, under hoop. The Wildcats have been the surprise hit of the season, going  31-3, winning the Pac-12 regular season and tournament titles, and claiming a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. They did all this by utilizing a fast-paced egalitarian system that is aesthetically pleasing and devastatingly effective. Arizona has the third-highest scoring average in the country (84.6 points per game) and ranks fifth in adjusted offensive efficiency, per KenPom.com. The Cats are eighth in tempo and fourth in average possession length (15.0 seconds). They are assisting on 65.4 percent of their made field goals, the highest clip in the nation. They lead the U.S. in assists (19.9 per game) and have recorded 277 more dimes than their opponents. Arizona is also the second tallest team in the country, which has enabled it to rank ninth in blocks (5.7 per game) and 20th in adjusted defensive efficiency.

With all that fast-breaking and leaking out, the Wildcats can be susceptible on the defensive glass (190th nationally in defensive rebound percentage), and they have a major injury concern after Kriisa sprained an ankle during last Thursday’s Pac-12 tournament quarterfinal win over Stanford. (The team is hopeful he will be in the lineup for its first-round game against Bryant or Wright State on Friday night.) Beyond that, the Wildcats’ primary concern is their youth. There is just one senior in the rotation, making Arizona the third-youngest team in the country, per KenPom. Yet, the Wildcats make up for their callowness with worldly maturity. When a player travels 7,000 miles and across 10 time zones to learn a new language, enroll in school, and compete in a totally unfamiliar setting, a late possession in a close NCAA Tournament game doesn’t seem quite so daunting.

It’s not unusual for an international player to feel out of place on a U.S. collegiate roster. At Arizona he’s right at home. It helps that first-year coach Tommy Lloyd, who became known as the godfather of international recruiting during a 20-year stint as an assistant at Gonzaga, has implemented a European style of play that is innately familiar to his imports. “We’ve been taught playing this way since we were kids,” Kriisa says. “When a person’s open, you pass it to him. Nobody has a huge ego.” Adds Tubelis, “It feels amazing when we share the ball. I think for every fan, it looks like good basketball. So I’m happy to be part of this.”

Those sentiments stand in stark contrast to the world beyond Arizona’s locker room, replete as it is with all kinds of divisiveness, most tragically a horrific war half a world away in Ukraine, whose northern border is 600 miles from Kriisa’s home nation of Estonia. “I love having a diverse locker room, not only racially but culturally,” Lloyd says. “It inspires you to know that with all the things going on in the world, it really is this easy. It’s just putting people together and letting them be normal people, where they can naturally support each other and not judge each other. It gives you hope.”