BERKELEY “”mdash; I’ve talked about how UCLA needs to get consistent scoring from its four best players.
I’ve talked about how the Bruins need to improve against the zone.
What I have failed to mention is that if junior Arron Afflalo plays up to his national reputation, none of the rest of that stuff is going to matter.
After scoring 22 points against Arizona on Saturday, Afflalo decided that he would throw up an encore performance of 25 points Thursday against Cal. While I don’t expect him to keep on accumulating points by increments of three, I figure that if he plays near this level for the rest of the season, the Bruins have to be considered the odds-on favorite to win the national title.
And remember, this is almost the same game Afflalo played last year at Cal when the Bruins were taking their Bay Area trip to clinch the Pac-10 regular season title. Afflalo had a bad first half but came out in the second half and absolutely murdered the Bears, again to the tune of 25 points. I still claim that the win over the Bears, and not the loss to USC, was what jump-started UCLA’s run to the national title game. So to put it another way, Afflalo basically jump-started the Bruins’ run to their biggest game since 1995.
In this game, Afflalo was arguably better than last year.
Afflalo not only threw in 25 points (20 of which came in the second half), he shut down Ayinde Ubaka. Shut down actually probably doesn’t suffice for what Afflalo did to Ubaka. Ubaka had zero points. On eight shots. Think about that. Previously, the case with Afflalo was that if he was truly shutting down his man, he had trouble getting it going on offense (or if he had trouble getting it going on offense, he tried even harder to shut down his man, not sure which). Not so on Thursday, and that has got to be scary for the rest of the Pac-10.
More to the point, it’s probably scary for the rest of the nation.
In that vein, there is no way this team should be ranked third in the nation. UCLA is No. 1 in both the RPI and strength of schedule. The Bruins’ one loss is to a team that came into Thursday ranked No. 9 in the nation.
The two teams ranked ahead of the Bruins, Florida and Wisconsin, are both good teams. But Florida lost to Florida State. And Wisconsin plays in the Big Ten, which is basically dirt this year. UCLA is 18-1 and 7-1 in the Pac-10, the toughest conference in the nation. The Bruins should never have been dropped so low after losing to Oregon on the road, and it is ridiculous that they remain behind a two-loss team in the rankings (I could see how you can justify Wisconsin).
At the end of the year, the Bruins are going to have something like two or three losses, conservatively, in the Pac-10, the toughest conference in the nation (yes, it is so nice that I have to say it twice). I can see them losing at Washington State. I can see them losing a game to be named later. Beyond that, nothing. Coach Ben Howland just doesn’t lose all that much.
At the end of the year, UCLA is probably going to be the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament, and all of these national pollsters are going to feel pretty stupid that they spent a good part of the year ranking the Bruins No. 3.
Or they won’t because they’re ignorant.
E-mail Woods at dwoods@media.ucla.edu if you think Cal’s fans suck pretty bad too.