TUCSON, Ariz. “”mdash; It was a metaphor for the entire game, a perfect image of what was to come.
Within the first minute of the No. 11 UCLA men’s basketball team’s game against Arizona, one play happened that would set the tone of the game for the Bruins throughout the next 39 minutes.
Arizona junior guard Nic Wise drove the lane for a layup, cutting the Bruin lead to 3-2. On the ensuing pass out of bounds, UCLA senior center Alfred Aboya threw the ball directly to Arizona’s junior forward Chase Budinger, who proceeded to make the layup, put the Wildcats up by one, and send the 14,611 in attendance at the McKale Center into a whirl.
Aboya’s turnover was one of 14 the Bruins committed in the first half ““ 20 on the day ““ in an 84-72 loss that was not nearly as close as the final score indicated.
It was the polar opposite from when the Bruins (19-6, 8-4 Pac-10) and Wildcats (18-8, 8-5) met earlier this season at Pauley Pavilion. On that night, Jan. 15, the Bruins dismantled the Wildcats, 83-60, attacking Arizona’s 2-3 zone defense with efficiency, while committing just 10 turnovers.
In Saturday’s game, Arizona presented a more aggressive style of their zone, even pressing the Bruin players in the full court, resulting in an overexcited UCLA offense that coughed the ball up too many times.
“I thought that they did a great job speeding us up,” UCLA coach Ben Howland said. “Their pressure today, both with their press and especially in the half-court zone, got us sped up to where we were going way too fast.”
Howland added after the game that the zone defense the Bruins saw on Saturday was “not even comparable” to the zone defense the Bruins attacked so effectively in January.
“They’re playing much more aggressive with their zone tonight than they did earlier in the year,” Howland said.
The high number of turnovers translated into one of the Bruins’ worst halves of the season as they found themselves down by 18 points heading into halftime. While the Bruins went on a desperate run late in the second half to trim what had grown to as much as a 25-point deficit to just nine, Howland said they had already given Arizona too great an advantage to mount a successful return.
“I thought we showed a lot of fight coming back out in the second half,” Howland said. “We really dug too big a hole with 14 turnovers in the first half. Way too many turnovers. We had a couple of plays where we’re throwing the ball right to the other guy on the other team. It was inexplicable.”
Against Washington on Jan. 24, the Bruins were similarly pressured into speeding up the tempo on offense, resulting in 14 turnovers. Yet senior point guard Darren Collison was adamant in his belief that the Bruins are able to handle the pressure well; Saturday was just a bad day.
“We’re usually a good team to handle the pressure,” said Collison, who finished with a team-high 26 points. “It was just one of those games where everybody was misreading everybody (and) wasn’t on the same page.”
Howland noted that Arizona has utilized the full-court pressure more regularly as of late, a part of the reason the Wildcats have won seven consecutive games and are currently one of the hottest teams in the Pac-10.
Budinger said it was a point of emphasis for the Wildcats to pressure the Bruins from the start of the game into a tempo they were uncomfortable with.
“We got after it,” Budinger said. “We applied pressure from the start. We tried to trap as much as we could and just frustrate them. It definitely worked; we were able to get a lot of steals from that pressure.”
Upon departing from Arizona with two losses, Aboya commented about the road trip and offered some optimistic words for the future.
“I think the last two games we’ve been rattled a little bit by the defensive pressure,” he said. “But we just learned something about our team this week, and we’re going to go back, fix it and bounce back from it.”