Every jumper, every gesture Hassan Adams made seemed to be
charged with emotion.
Adams was home again, back at Pauley Pavilion, the venerable old
building in which he had spent many an afternoon watching UCLA
basketball as a youth.
Making just his second road trip to Westwood as an Arizona
Wildcat, the combustible sophomore guard seemed intent on proving
to every last blue-shirted Bruin fan in attendance that, at least
for one mid-January afternoon, Pauley belonged to him.
He whooped and hollered his way to 23 points on 8-for-16
shooting Saturday as the Wildcats dealt UCLA its first Pac-10 loss,
a 25-point shellacking on its own home court.
“I was going to do whatever it took to get a win,”
said Adams, whose Wildcats had lost two straight heading into the
game. “Beating UCLA is a great feeling, and to do it here in
Los Angeles, makes it even better.”
A large contingent of Adams’ friends and family were on
hand to watch the former Westchester High standout deliver one of
his best performances of the season against the program he grew up
idolizing.
Adams, who spurned a scholarship offer from UCLA in favor of
Arizona in 2001, offered a glimpse of why he was so highly regarded
by both programs, playing tenacious defense and burying four
critical 3-pointers.
At just 6-foot-4, he repeatedly out-leaped the taller UCLA big
men underneath the basket, pulling down nine rebounds, three more
than any Bruin could muster.
“He’s just a warrior,” UCLA coach Ben Howland
said. “He plays much bigger than his height inside. He has a
big heart, and he’s a great competitor.”
If consecutive losses to Stanford and USC weren’t enough
motivation, Saturday’s game featured Adams’ first-ever
head-to-head match-up with UCLA freshman Trevor Ariza, a close
friend and former prep teammate.
A jam-packed UCLA student section serenaded Adams with chants of
“Trevor’s better” throughout the first half, but
on this afternoon, it was Adams who scored a decisive victory in
the much-anticipated battle.
Ariza finished with 18 points, many of which came long after
Arizona had broken the game wide open, while most of Adams’
buckets proved to be critical to the outcome.
Most vital, perhaps, was a first-half 3-point play that helped
the Wildcats jump out to a double-digit lead. Adams punctuated the
play by glaring at the crowd, and gesticulating in the direction of
the students who had been heckling him. The silence that followed
spoke volumes.
“Hassan is excitable already, but he’s crazy when he
comes back home,” Arizona center Channing Frye said.
“He works really hard. It’s good that we got him a
win.”
It’s no coincidence that Adams was a target of the
fans’ ire Saturday after he repeatedly questioned the
determination and desire of the Bruins under former coach Steve
Lavin last season.
After Saturday’s victory, however, Adams was largely
complimentary of what he’d seen from the Bruins in spite of
the lopsided score.
“They play much harder now that they’ve finally got
a good coach,” Adams said. “If (Howland) was here two
years ago, I probably would have come here.”
That’s little consolation to Bruin fans left wondering
what Adams might have achieved had he stayed in Los Angeles.
For Adams, however, not sporting the letters U-C-L-A across his
chest didn’t make a difference Saturday as he arrived at
Pauley Pavilion. Even clad in Wildcat red, white and blue, it still
felt like home.