The Bruins remain 16-2, remain 4-1 in conference, and remain at least tied for first in the Pac-10.
Despite the debacle of Saturday’s game against the Trojans at Pauley Pavilion, UCLA’s basketball team is still in perfectly fine position to win the conference and get a high seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Bruins have already beaten Washington State once, and the Cougars are expected to be the most serious competition for the conference title.
But despite one game not having a tremendous amount of significance in a 30-plus game season, no matter how bad that one game is, the 72-63 loss to the Trojans cast a light on some of this team’s weaknesses.
With three minutes to go and the game’s outcome still undecided, point guard Darren Collison spent most of each possession dribbling ineffectually on the perimeter, neither getting the ball in to Kevin Love in the post nor getting it into others’ hands to make plays.”We just didn’t have the tempo control,” Collison said. “That’s when I have to step in and control the tempo. I didn’t do a good job of that, and we were missing shots.”
Josh Shipp, after playing well for most of the game, made some bad decisions in the closing minutes. With the game in doubt at the end, he hoisted bad 3-point shots and played matador defense on Daniel Hackett, who got by him twice for layups in the latter stages.
Throughout the game, the Bruins played to the Trojans’ strengths, speeding up on offense and not getting high percentage shots. Alfred Aboya and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, neither of whom would be thought of as offensive threats from 18 feet, hoisted countless jumpers from that distance thanks to the triangle-and-two defense the Trojans threw at them, leaving the two forwards open on the wings. They finished 1-of-11 from the field.
“I think we have five of our next seven on the road now,” coach Ben Howland said. “So we’ve got to come back and learn from this defeat and see what we have to do to execute better and play better as a team.”
But perhaps most troubling for the Bruins, and perhaps the one thing that could have the most significance down the road, is the Bruins’ lack of poise and inability to respond to the Trojans.
“From my perspective out there, I just felt like after a made bucket or after they threw down a dunk you could just see it in our face, you could see it in our bodies; we were just down,” Love said. “To me that makes me mad. I’m not really calling out my teammates, I’m calling out myself and the rest of the team. How can you not be up for a game like this?”
The Bruins will have to figure that out and more in the coming weeks as they prepare to hit the bulk of the Pac-10 schedule.
With 13 games left to play in the regular season, the Bruins are still in first place in the Pac-10 and have already beaten their top rival for the conference title. But they can’t afford many more games like Saturday’s.