Depending on whether your glass is half full or half empty, the
Bruins either earned themselves a stay of execution or took one
step closer to the guillotine.
UCLA overcame Senior Day jitters and a 14-point deficit to shoot
74.2 percent from the field in the second half and beat Washington
83-72 Saturday night in front of 8,717 people at Pauley
Pavilion.
And so the Bruins (9-18, 6-12 Pac-10), who ever since going on a
nine-game losing streak have asked only for a chance in the Pac-10
Tournament, have gotten just that, a game against No. 1 Arizona on
Thursday at Staples Center.
“We’re fortunate, blessed and glad we’re in
the Pac-10 Tournament,” senior Jason Kapono said after his
last game at Pauley. “We definitely made it by the hardest
possible way.”
Indeed, UCLA didn’t clinch the final berth in the
conference tournament until the very last day of the Pac-10 season.
The Bruins entered Saturday with a do-or-die scenario that could
have left them as high as sixth or as low as ninth at the end of
the night.
Early on, the Bruins played as if it were any other game.
Sluggish and tentative, UCLA allowed Washington (10-17, 5-13) to go
into the half up 10 points.
Kapono and Ray Young, the two Bruin seniors honored before the
game, shot a combined 2 of 12 in the first half.
“Sometimes on Senior Day there’s just so much
emotion and you want to play so well so badly that you jump right
over the fight and miss the fight,” UCLA head coach Steve
Lavin said.
Young and Kapono settled down, and so did the rest of the
Bruins. In the middle of a rollicking UCLA comeback, the seniors
hit back-to-back three pointers to pull the Bruins within two.
Minutes later, sophomore Andre Patterson wrestled away a rebound
from Washington’s Mike Jensen and threw it downcourt to a
waiting Dijon Thompson, who drilled a three to put UCLA ahead for
the first time.
Washington tried to keep up with the near-perfect UCLA shooting,
even pulling the game to within three. When junior T.J. Cummings
missed two consecutive free throws, that familiar feeling of
another one getting away overtook Pauley.
But Young skied for the rebound, flailed at it with his right
hand and tipped it in.
“We finally got a break,” Young said. “It was
a break I had hoped to get a long time ago.”
Young’s follow-up and game-clinching free throws down the
stretch capped one of the team’s best-looking halves. UCLA
outscored Washington 57-36 and left Husky coach Lorenzo Romar
wondering what happened.
“Their shooters just got away from us even though we
played the same defense as the first half,” Romar said.
Thompson led the team with 26 points on 12 of 16 shooting, while
Kapono and Young both added 20. It was the first time all year that
three Bruins scored 20 or more points in the same game.
Students stormed the court after the final horn, perhaps to get
one last good look at their Bruins before they are thrown to the
Wildcats on Thursday. UCLA lost to Arizona by a combined 71 points
in their two meetings this season, and the Bruins will most
certainly be huge underdogs.
Had USC lost to Washington State, UCLA would have slid into the
No. 6 seed and played Cal, the only elite conference team the
Bruins beat this year.
But the Trojans won and UCLA must pull off the unthinkable upset
now rather than later.
“Whether we have to play them in the first or last game,
we still have to beat them,” Kapono said.
“Now we have our opportunity, where it doesn’t
matter whether you’re 30-0 or 0-30,” Lavin said.
“If you take advantage of the opportunity you move on. If you
don’t, it’s an early spring.”