With his eyes fixed on the game clock, Michael Fey watched and
waited, his hands wrapped around the ball as a trio of Trojans
tried to wrestle it away.
As the final buzzer sounded, the Bruins’ starting center
still had a firm grip and could let out a sigh of relief.
UCLA would not let its season slip away at the hands of its
crosstown rival.
While it was Fey’s offensive rebound in the final seconds
that secured the Bruins’ 72-69 win over USC Saturday, it was
his entire team’s second-half resurgence that halted
UCLA’s midseason skid.
With a three-game losing streak going into the game and an
18-point deficit going into the half at the Sports Arena, a
once-promising season for the Bruins (11-6, 5-4 Pac-10) appeared to
be spiraling out of control.
But when Trojan guard Nick Young’s 3-pointer rimmed out in
the final seconds, UCLA’s spirited second-half comeback was
complete, its critics silenced in the process.
“We needed this win desperately,” UCLA coach Ben
Howland said. “This was a huge gut check. These guys
don’t drop their heads when they’re down. They fight
back.”
Not only would a loss to USC (9-11, 2-7) have been the
Bruins’ fifth straight, it would have lent more credence to
the comparisons being drawn between last year’s team and this
one.
“I wasn’t thinking about the rivalry coming into
this game,” said Dijon Thompson, who had a game-high 24
points. “I wanted to break our three-game losing streak. I
could care less about the “˜SC rivalry.”
Last year, a Bruin team that dropped 14 of its last 16 games
also carried a three-game losing streak into the rivalry match-up,
fueling talk that this year’s squad was bound for a similar
collapse.
Early on, that speculation appeared warranted as the Trojans
closed out the first half with a 12-0 run to take a 43-25 lead into
the break. In the half’s final five minutes, the Bruins
committed six turnovers, five fouls, and scored only one field
goal.
“We got tired, had a couple of bad turnovers, and dug a
hole for ourselves,” Howland said.
They began digging themselves out of it immediately in the
second half. Thompson, the Bruins’ leading scorer on the
season, scored six points during a 12-4 UCLA run to cut USC’s
lead down to 10 only four minutes into the second half. His layup
with just over eight minutes remaining gave UCLA its first lead,
56-54.
“He’s one of the best players in the conference,
without question,” Howland said. “He took the game over
offensively when the game got tight.”
And in the game’s tightest and most crucial moments,
Thompson was the Bruin who did the best job erasing the bitter
memories of a year ago. With the score tied at 69-69 and less than
one minute remaining, Thompson passed up an open jumper and drove
to the basket, drawing a foul on Gregg Guenther.
“With a really good player like him, you let him go with
his feel,” Howland said. “He really
produced.”
Thompson’s struggles at the free-throw line in the final
seconds of last year’s contest cost UCLA a chance to win at
the Sports Arena. But on Saturday, the senior hit his pair of free
throws and added one more with 15 seconds left to give the Bruins
their final three-point margin of victory. Fey’s offensive
rebound at the end of the game capped off a second half in which
UCLA coralled nine more rebounds than USC and shot over 20 percent
better than the Trojans from the field.
“In the second half, we came out much more physical
defensively,” Howland said. “We played with an emotion
and intensity we need to play with all the time.”
The Bruins’ lackadaisical first-half play has been a
recurring trend this season. Against Cal and Stanford, UCLA yielded
double-digit first-half leads to its opponents, but unlike
Saturday’s game, they could not pull out the comeback. Even
in wins over Washington State and Washington earlier this month,
the Bruins fell behind by 16 and 21 points respectively before
pulling out late victories.
“We spend a lot of time on walk-throughs and game plans
(in practice) and we’re really thinking about that instead of
just playing,” point guard Jordan Farmar said of UCLA’s
struggles at the start of games. “When our back is up against
the wall, we have no choice. We just go play. That’s when
we’re at our best.”
On Saturday afternoon, that wall appeared ready to collapse and
leave the Bruins crushed at the bottom of a pile of rubble. But at
the end of the game, the wall remained standing and so were the
Bruins ““ still clinging to the ball and to their hopes for a
successful season.