You know that feeling the morning after, that feeling when you
wake up and think, “What the hell just happened?”
That’s how I feel right now.
After a whole day to digest the Bruins’ inexplicable 64-51
loss to Cal on Saturday, it still doesn’t seem real. It
couldn’t have been real, right?
The same team that beat No. 10 Washington didn’t just lose
to the Pac-10 doormat Golden Bears at Pauley Pavilion, did it?
But the more I try to convince myself that it didn’t
happen, the more overwhelmingly clear it becomes that it actually
did. The details start rushing back ““ some dude named David
Paris pretty much scoring at will on anybody (he shot 10-for-11),
UCLA’s atrocious shooting for all but the game’s final
two minutes (good job, Arron Afflalo), and the eerily silent Pauley
Pavilion crowd (well, what was left of it) as the final seconds
ticked off the clock.
It was truly a pathetic performance from the Bruins, the kind of
performance that should make people question this team and rethink
our expectations. So now, the morning after, we must face up to
what happened. We must accept it and strive to understand it. And
we must hope beyond hope that UCLA doesn’t play like that
ever again.
After Saturday’s game, Jordan Farmar, Josh Shipp, and
Dijon Thompson sat glum-faced, answering the questions they
certainly didn’t want to answer.
What went wrong? Why did you guys suck so much against
Cal’s zone? What was up with the headbands?
Thompson was asked if he ever would have believed it if someone
told him at the beginning of the week that his team would be swept
at home by Stanford and Cal.
“No. Not at all,” he said.
Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the Bruins were too sure
of themselves.
Maybe they thought they could waltz into Pauley and get the
momentum going again against, in this case, a mediocre team and an
outright bad team.
That’s what makes this so hard. Cal is not a good
basketball team. USC beat them by 17. They played Saturday without
their leading scorer. Yet they still won convincingly.
“We just didn’t come out to play,” Farmar
said. “At all.”
That’s something I just can’t understand. These guys
get to do something they love. They’re worshipped around this
place. They work so hard every day in practice, and playing a game
in front of 12,000 people is the ultimate reward. And then they
don’t come out to play?
As far as I’m concerned, there are very few times when
it’s okay for a sportswriter to criticize a team. But this
happens to be one of those few times.
My rule is that criticism is unwarranted when a team simply
loses to a better team. In sports, that happens a lot. In
UCLA’s losses to teams like Michigan State and Boston
College, the Bruins simply lost to better teams.
One could argue that Stanford might even be better than UCLA.
But Cal? I can’t justify that.
UCLA lost a very important game at home to a team that is not
good. The Bruins didn’t play with a sense of passion or a
sense of urgency. Their passes weren’t crisp, their
decision-making was suspect and their shooting was awful.
Their interior defense was horrible, they were terribly confused
against the zone and their shooting was awful.
They weren’t aggressive in getting to the basket, they
didn’t look to push the ball and their shooting was
awful.
As a Bruin fan, that was a very tough game to watch. There
wasn’t much to get excited about. The only positives I could
take from the game, in fact, were that two people had a chance to
make the half-courter on the Super Shot at halftime, and I kept my
perfect score intact on the Bruin Shuffle. So there.
Trying to come to grips with this loss, I want to believe that
Ben Howland can coach his team through this three-game losing
streak. I want to believe that they’ll hand it to USC on
Saturday and make a run at the NCAA Tournament. I want to believe
that this team will stay together, united toward a common goal.
But to tell you the truth, I’m a little scared. For a team
to come out like that and play with such little passion and desire,
I’m genuinely worried about UCLA’s prospects this
season.
I just wish I didn’t have to wake up and feel this
way.
E-mail Regan at dregan@media.ucla.edu.