BERKELEY “”mdash; Great teams have magic.
Or magic gets placed on them. Don’t ask me. I’m not really sure how it works.
On Sunday night, it almost looked like the UCLA men’s basketball team was getting a little of the coveted fairy dust.
When junior guard Malcolm Lee’s deep fade away 3 bounced off the front of the rim, the regulation horn sounded, then the ball fell back through the net, I thought that was the sign. I’m positive we all did.
Instead, UCLA didn’t take advantage of the boon, succumbing to California 76-72 in the overtime period, and leaving Bruin fans at the altar for the team’s seventh-straight win that never was.
Relegated to a losing team’s highlight reel, Lee’s heroic shot became simply a kiss on the cheek before the phrase “I think we should just be friends.”
The scrappy Cal Bears and their scrappy leader Jorge Gutierrez with his scrappy career-high 34 points made sure of that.
Yes, UCLA’s most recent loss was painful for Bruin fans, but not because the Bruins should have won. They shouldn’t have. At halftime, they were down by 11 and were getting beaten in nearly every statistical category.
And it wasn’t painful because the Bruins have now lost major ground in the Pac-10 race, which they have, but it was going to be nearly impossible to win the conference anyway given the difficulty of UCLA’s remaining schedule.
No, the reason it really hurts is because it reminded Bruin fans of something they know, but were too afraid to admit when UCLA was stacking up consecutive wins like red plastic cups.
This team is still ““ 27 games into the season ““ a work in progress, and it has about as much magic as a kid running face-first into a wall at King’s Cross station.
“We felt like it was meant to be for us to win that game,” sophomore forward Tyler Honeycutt said. “For us to lose like that probably hurts more.”
Lee, now the team’s most consistent player on both sides of the ball, was the only one to admit a sense of inflated self-worth.
“When you get on a winning streak, you kind of forget about reality,” Lee said. “This (loss) slaps us back to reality, like, “˜Yo, we’re still trying to fight to get into the (NCAA) Tournament.'”
The biggest regrets in UCLA’s postgame interviews referred to the team’s slow start, scoring a season-low 18 points in the first half. It’s scary because this is nowhere near the first time the Bruins have been spirit-deprived in the early goings.
Against Oregon about a week before, UCLA spotted its opponent an eight-point advantage in the first half. St. John’s got a nine-point lead before the Bruins brought it back.
And those are just examples from UCLA’s recent win streak.
“There’s really no excuse for coming out flat with where we’re at right now,” sophomore forward Reeves Nelson said.
Then, out of nowhere in the second half against Cal, coach Ben Howland decided to reverse his militant stance against the zone defense and send his boys out there in a 2-3. It actually wasn’t a half-bad strategy considering no one expected it, not even the UCLA players.
“It caught me by surprise to tell you the truth,” freshman center Joshua Smith said. “I remember
going in the huddle, and he said we were going to run zone, and I was just kind of like, “˜Oh, OK.'”
Despite the somewhat positive reaction to the surprise defensive scheme’s performance, Howland later claimed the “Z” word would not be making any more appearances on his lips for the remainder of the season. In the end, the whole ordeal leaves the Bruins looking just a little more confused than they should be at this point.
With just four regular-season games left, each one more important than the next, UCLA doesn’t exactly have time to work out a lot of kinks.
The Bruins will take their game into the lab and dissect the film. Maybe they will find a way to reliably start the game with passion. Maybe they will unanimously agree on a defensive game plan. Maybe they will win some more games before the postseason begins.
But if, like on Sunday, they don’t have that unique feeling that things are clicking ““ call it magic, mojo or swagger ““ then maybe this is not the fateful year nor the team of destiny that UCLA fans are hoping it to be.
Smukler co-hosts “Overtime with Daily Bruin Sports,” which airs every Monday at 6:30 p.m. on
UCLAradio.com. E-mail him at esmukler@media.ucla.edu.