As of right now, one of the two teams that played Saturday at
Pauley Pavilion is going to the Pac-10 Tournament.
(Hint: it’s not the one with 11 national
championships.)
The Bruins’ 83-79 loss to Oregon State dumped them into
sole possession of ninth place in the conference, and,
consequently, into uncharted territory for UCLA basketball.
Last season’s sixth-place Pac-10 finish was the worst in
school history but is beginning to look like an impossibility in
this record-setting season.
“Nobody ever thought that this was going to happen,”
sophomore Andre Patterson said.
The Pac-10 media surely didn’t think so when they
predicted UCLA would finish in third place, but here the Bruins
are, with all of two conference wins to their credit halfway
through Pac-10 play.
The team that’s lately been accustomed to making runs at
20 wins and NCAA Tournament berths is all of a sudden calculating
the number of victories it will take just to sneak past Washington
into eighth place.
Last year, the Huskies needed five wins and a late Oregon State
loss to UCLA in order to land the final slot in the Pac-10
Tournament.
The Bruins aren’t even on pace for that many wins, though
a marked improvement in play this past weekend has them
encouraged.
“That’s why we have another half of the Pac-10
season,” senior Ray Young said.
And in this most improbably futile season, the final weekend,
when the Washington schools come to Pauley, is arguably the most
important two-game stretch remaining.
Should the Bruins sweep lowly Washington State and a solid but
beatable Husky squad, they would have at a minimum four conference
wins. But more importantly, they’d own a tiebreaker advantage
over Washington by virtue of beating the Huskies twice.
Washington has one more game against its in-state rivals, a game
the Huskies will likely win. In that case, both UCLA and Washington
would own four victories, and a win against any other team (like
USC, UCLA’s Wednesday opponent) could mean the
difference.
With road series at both the Arizona and Oregon schools and a
homestand against strong teams from Stanford and Cal,
Wednesday’s game against the Trojans might be the
Bruins’ best shot at getting that extra win.
UCLA head coach Steve Lavin had been talking about the
importance of the conference tournament March 13-15 as an
opportunity for his team to catch a hot streak and maybe surprise
some people, but right now, he isn’t exactly counting
victories.
“It’s just discouraging and frustrating that we
haven’t been able to put together any type of successful
basketball,” he said.
And it’s all pretty strange for a team that’s used
to striving for a different kind of Elite Eight.
“We’re gonna make it, I know for a fact,”
Patterson said. “We’ve been in every game, we’ve
just lost a couple of cheap ones. In the Pac-10 Tournament,
you’re 0-0.”