This UCLA men’s basketball team is like a stunt man about to perform his first major jump.
He is sitting stationary on his motorcycle with a kind of quiet anxiety, the engine humming loudly in his ears. In the distance, he can see the large canyon, a stretch of air of unknown distance separating the two tangible masses of land. It’s the dangerous yet alluring thrill that runs through his veins just before he pulls on his accelerator.
So here sits UCLA, eager to find out if it can land such a jump.
It’s been two and a half years since the Bruins beat a ranked non-conference opponent or any ranked team outside of Pauley Pavilion. Since its last Final Four run in 2008, UCLA has systematically faded from college basketball’s national discussion.
Coach Ben Howland and his team will get their first chance of the season to return to that level of relevancy this week, with a pair of games at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
UCLA (3-0) will try to upset No. 7 Villanova (4-0) on Wednesday night and then will get either No. 24 Tennessee (3-0) or Virginia Commonwealth (3-0) on Friday to complete the NIT Season Tip-Off Tournament. Each of the teams is looking to get an early marquee win to stamp on its season resume.
It feels way too soon to place heavy implications on any game, but we will undoubtedly learn more from this tournament about the reality of the Bruin basketball team than we have in the prognostications of the last eight months.
Is this really a new team? Has this program ended its hiatus from winning basketball? Is UCLA back?
“Not yet,” sophomore forward Tyler Honeycutt said. “We haven’t really played anybody yet. We haven’t really had a test.”
Well, here it is: that first graded work, the one that tells you if you should drop the class to keep your GPA afloat or tough it out for the long haul and start actually taking notes in lecture.
A win, as always, would do wonders for this squad. But a win against a highly-ranked team from a power basketball conference like the Big East, on national television, in what will basically be a road environment? A win like that could make last season’s disappointments seem like a long repressed childhood memory.
“We’ll see,” Honeycutt said. “If we do have a good game, if we do win, then it’s going to say a lot for our team.”
This is big for Howland, too, who was downright giddy after UCLA beat Pacific last week to make its trip to the Big Apple official.
“Right after the game, he came into the locker room and he was just so excited,” junior guard Lazeric Jones said. “I’ve never seen him that excited.”
Going back East to play Villanova reminds Howland of the four years he spent as the coach that resurrected basketball at the University of Pittsburgh. He recalls winning the school’s first ever Big East Tournament Championship at Madison Square Garden in 2003.
“That was awesome,” Howland said. “We beat UConn (Connecticut) when they had (Emeka) Okafor and (Ben) Gordon. That was really, really special.”
Another more recent memory must be budding to the surface as well. This week’s field is eerily familiar to the one that spit the Bruins out in the second round of the 2009 NCAA Tournament.
UCLA had been given the bracket’s sixth seed and was nearly upset by 11th-seeded VCU before getting demolished, 89-69, by Villanova two days later in front of over 19,000 mostly Wildcat fans at Philadelphia’s Wachovia Center.
Just two years later, the squads look different, but not entirely changed. ‘Nova’s Corey Fisher, who made 13 points as a sophomore in that March Madness game, is now the team’s leading scorer as a senior. UCLA junior guards Malcolm Lee and Jerime Anderson combined for only 26 minutes as freshmen in that game, but it’s not like they’ve forgotten what it’s like to get knocked out of the NCAA Tournament by 20 points.
Despite the premier venue and the name recognition of the teams, this is not the Big East Tournament or the NCAA Tournament, of course. Two wins or two losses by the end of the weekend will neither coronate nor doom this team. But it is a grand opportunity nonetheless.
Despite only recently joining the Bruins, Jones, the team’s transfer-turned-starting-point-guard, shows a surprising awareness for the state of UCLA basketball in the larger context.
Maybe it’s because he can both see this program from an outsider’s perspective as well as feel the emotions of his teammates who have experienced it from the inside.
“Right now, I feel that we’ve already somehow made that push toward coming back to where UCLA has been,” Jones said on Friday, as he reflected on the team’s unblemished early-season record and looked ahead to the heavily-favored Villanova squad waiting in New York.
“It can really be a statement game,” he added. “It can be a test for us to show where we are in the season and where we can be.”
This UCLA team has already shown flashes of superior ability.
Maybe with a little more experience working on that quick transition game, the Bruins may have the kind of chemistry that simply overwhelms their opponents.
The Bruins are young enough though that it feels like they could use a bit more time to ferment. And with Lee’s ankle injury possibly preventing his play or at least hampering his effectiveness, they will go into this event at less-than-full strength.
But there isn’t time for that kind of hesitation with today’s college basketball schedules.
Sometimes, the only way you can truly test your mettle is by setting aside your nerves and running your motorcycle off of a cliff in front of a national audience.
You might just land on the other side capable of anything.
Smukler co-hosts the Daily Bruin Sports Show, which airs every Monday at 6:30 p.m. on uclaradio.com.
E-mail him at esmukler@media.ucla.edu.