Arizona Wildcats star junior guard Allonzo Trier has been cleared to return to the court after being declared ineligible by the NCAA one week ago for failing a drug test, UA announced Thursday.
Trier was ruled ineligible by the NCAA on Thursday, Feb. 22 after testing positive for a banned substance. According to UA, that substance was the same substance found in Trier's body in 2016, which caused him to miss the first half of the 2016-17 college basketball season. UA immediately appealed the NCAA's decision last week.
The news comes hours after we learned Sean Miller will remain the Wildcats' head men's basketball coach following a report from ESPN that Miller was heard discussing payment to a top recruit via FBI wiretap.
Trier, a 6-foot-5, 205-pound junior from Seattle, is averaging 19.6 points per game this season, the second-highest mark in the Pac-12 behind his teammate, freshman center Deandre Ayton. Trier is also among the Pac-12's leaders in field-goal, free-throw and 3-point percentage.
Trier missed UA's previous two games, at Oregon State and Oregon. The Wildcats defeated Oregon State without Trier but fell to Oregon in overtime.
Trier and the Wildcats will face Stanford on Thursday night in McKale Center. A win would ensure UA of at least a share of the 2017-18 Pac-12 regular-season championship.
In a statement in January of 2017, Trier said he was "shocked" to learn he tested positive for a banned performance-enhancing drug, for which he was ruled ineligible for UA's first 19 games of the 2016-17 season.
Trier eventually cleared a drug test and was ruled eligible to play beginning with UA's Jan. 21 game at UCLA.
"In late January 2018, Allonzo participated in an NCAA student-athlete drug screening. The results of that test, confirmed today, revealed the reappearance of a trace amount of a banned substance," UA said in a statement last week. "The amount detected was miniscule by scientific standards and appears to be a remnant of a substance, which the NCAA agreed, Allonzo had unknowingly ingested in 2016."
