Every game this season has brought a new lesson plan for the UCLA men’s basketball team. And the topic of the lecture in Professor Ben Howland’s class this week is turnovers.
UCLA is certainly a young team, but in Saturday’s 70-59 loss at Stanford even the team’s elders played as if they were still wet behind the ears, as the squad racked up a season-high 23 turnovers.
This prompted the Bruins’ coach to bust out the old chalk and robe for another educational narrative.
In his weekly press conference, Howland recalled an image of an errant pass from that game, this one committed by senior forward Nikola Dragovic.
“We get a steal, and he tried to throw it long, and it’s not even close to being open,” Howland said. “They steal it, come back and hit a 3. That’s a big turnaround.”
There were many plays like that over the course of the Bruins’ game in Palo Alto, and Howland does not want to see more of the same when the Trojans bus over to Pauley Pavilion this Saturday for the teams’ first rivalry game of the season.
“We have to value each and every possession that we get,” he said.
Every good teacher knows that there’s more to the learning process than just stating the answer; the students have to be just as well-versed.
“It was very frustrating because by halftime (against Stanford, even with) a lot of the mistakes that we made, we were still in the game,” starting freshman forward Tyler Honeycutt said. “I knew that they could have been corrected, and we really could have won that game.”
The pupils appear to be listening.
“It was a very winnable game,” said forward Reeves Nelson, UCLA’s other starting freshman.
Now, the Bruins just have to make it part of their game, like they did with their shooting.
Earlier in the year, UCLA would go for long stretches without much scoring, especially from the outside. They shot less than 37 percent from the floor on four separate nights in the season’s first month,
So far in conference play however, the Bruins have found their stroke, leading the Pac-10 in both field goal and 3-point shooting percentage.
Protecting the ball is just the next step in cementing the essentials.
“You’d be surprised at some of the fundamentals that are not habits of kids coming out of high school,” Howland said. “Not just here, anywhere.”
With UCLA at 2-2 in conference, the team is tied with four other Pac-10 squads in the standings, including upcoming opponent USC. Only two weeks into league play, with every team in the Pac-10 having at least one win, this is the quickest that has happened since the conference expanded to 10 teams for the 1978-1979 season.
With such parity, there isn’t much that separates the Bruins from their revised season goal of achieving a good seed in March’s Pac-10 Tournament.
Howland has a pretty good idea of what separated his team from a win against Stanford, though.
“Today, when I meet with the team I’m going to talk about the fact that we have 69 turnovers to our opponent’s 39 in these first four games (of Pac-10 play),” he said. “That’s it right there.”
“We’re even on the boards. We’re shooting better than our opponents from the field and from the 3, so it comes down to if we have 15 turnovers instead of 23, we give ourselves a chance to win on Saturday.”
So how do you properly teach ball-fumbling prevention theory? It’s quite simple, actually.
“Every time the team makes a turnover, we’re going to run a sprint for that.”