Howard Cosell once told Muhammad Ali, “You’re being extremely truculent.”
To which Ali quickly retorted, “Whatever “˜truculent’ means, if it’s good, I’m that.”
It’s good for a pugilist; it’s also good for a basketball team.
In their past two games, the once passive and deliberate UCLA Bruins exploded after six rounds of rope-a-dope. The attack is back.
And they are a completely different team when they play with such fierce, relentless aggression.
The exact tipping point is difficult to pinpoint.
It might have been Tuesday’s intense practice after a day off. Or perhaps it was a meeting in which, according to senior leader Darren Collison, “the emphasis was to raise the level of intensity.”
Whatever it was, it worked.
The Bruins morphed from one of the slower-paced teams in the country into a basketball blitzkrieg, incessantly attacking the basket off the dribble, launching quick shots and pushing the tempo as if Paul Westhead were roaming the sideline. Coach Ben Howland even started substituting in waves of four or five ““ fresh legs for an onslaught of high-intensity, up-tempo basketball.
“We definitely tried to get to the rack more,” freshman guard Jrue Holiday said. “Before we were a little passive. Now, I really think that we are trying to attack (the defense) and put pressure on them so everybody else will collapse on us. It opens up the game.”
“The easiest time to run is when you create havoc with your defense,” Howland said Saturday after a 97-63 rout of Stanford in which UCLA amassed 10 steals. The 97 points were the highest total for any Howland-coached Bruin squad in a Pac-10 game.
Sure, those transition opportunities are fueled by turnovers.
But UCLA is looking to push the pace off of misses and shooting noticeably earlier in the halfcourt. It’s not quite Mike D’Antoni’s “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns’ offense, but the Bruins aren’t using much of the shot clock.
In Thursday’s 81-66 victory over Cal, UCLA had 29 of its 72 possessions take less than 10 seconds. Only 11 times in the game did the shot clock tick below 15.
Saturday the Bruins were even faster: 30 of 72 possessions were shorter than 10 seconds, and only seven times did the timer run under 15.
After halftime against the Cardinal, UCLA scored 26 points on 13 possessions in just over six minutes. The shot clock never dipped below 15 during the run.
That’s a staggering two points per possession. An efficient offensive team usually averages 1.1 or 1.2 points per possession.
Amazingly, it was only two weeks ago that the Bruins played to a near standstill on offense against Arizona State, rotting away possessions and failing to score for what seemed like geologic epochs.
“I’m tired of losing games,” Collison kept saying. This from a player who lost all of 12 regular season games in his first three years.
Howland told Collison he can’t be tentative. The result was a more aggressive player on both ends of the court leading the charge.
“I’m not waiting for teams to double me,” Collison explained. “I think I was waiting for teams to double me in (previous) games.”
There was no waiting this weekend.
The Bruins were off the ropes and swinging away from the opening tip.
They were exciting, and they were dominant.
They were downright truculent. And yes, that’s good.
If you like your basketball team to be truculent, e-mail Taylor at btaylor@media.ucla.edu.