Keeping momentum through Madness

That loss to Washington was neither pleasant nor necessary, but since the players acted like it didn’t matter, I’m gonna go ahead and do the same.

In the words of Forrest Gump:

“That’s all I have to say about that.”

On to the postseason.

The Bruins locked up the No. 1 seed for the Pac-10 tournament last week against Stanford, but they solidified the regular season Pac-10 championship with their victory over Washington State on Thursday. They will enter the Pac-10 Tournament as the favorite, and if they come to play, they will win it.

Of course, if they don’t, we could see another game like the Washington game.

And I can see how some might think that the Pac-10 Tournament matters about as much as the Washington game. It’s a tournament to determine a champion in one of the few leagues that actually plays a round-robin schedule; thus, it is stupid. The champion is already determined because teams play each other twice. Playing a postseason tournament to determine a champion of a league where the champion is already determined strikes me as peculiar (somebody told me this was like the English Cup in soccer in terms of how much it matters, to which I responded, “What’s soccer?”).

All the same, I’m going to go ahead and contradict what I just said and say it is important that UCLA wins the tournament.

Even discounting the fact that if they win the tournament, the Bruins will be the prohibitive favorite to snag the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, UCLA needs momentum. I realize the Bruins are just one game removed from playing one of their best games of the season, but that’s how easily momentum can be killed.

Of course, a No. 1-seeded team can build momentum in the first round of the NCAA tournament by crushing whatever patsy is offered up as a sacrifice from the Big Sky conference. But it’s not the same as the kind of momentum that would be built by winning the tournament of the toughest conference in the nation (that would be the Pac-10, coincidentally enough).

So basically, it would be kind of nifty if the Bruins could just go ahead and win it.

To do so, however, they will need to try harder than they did against Washington. They need to understand that unlike a team like Florida, which probably can just flip the switch, cruise through the SEC Tournament and get to the Final Four (the Gators’ recent play notwithstanding), they simply do not have the talent level to just flip a switch and play their best basketball. The Bruins will need to use Thursday’s game against the winner of the Oregon State-Cal game as a means to build some confidence.

A lot of people have been telling me that this loss to Washington reminds them a lot of the loss to USC late last year that basically galvanized the Bruins into taking the rest of the season seriously (which led to them winning every game until the championship game against Florida). I don’t really see it, just because the USC game came at an inexplicable time, when UCLA was still in danger of not winning the Pac-10. This game was about as meaningless as a regular season Pac-10 game can get (exception: all games involving Oregon State).

Still, it would have been nice to win it. The Bruins were playing at an exceptional level before Saturday’s game, and if they weren’t going to come out and compete on Saturday, they may as well have started the entire second team and given them experience for the coming tournament season by playing them in the hostile Seattle environment.

And it would be sick if UCLA could stop laying eggs on national TV.

E-mail Woods at dwoods@media.ucla.edu if you think fire will rain from the skies if Oregon State wins the Pac-10 Tournament.

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