Court Visions: Being closer to Madness helps greatly

Oh, the places they will go.

After the home fans gave UCLA a loud send-off on Saturday and the team responded with a win, everyone exited Pauley Pavilion knowing a game wouldn’t be played there again this season.

So where will the Bruins be?

Today they’re in rural Washington trying to defend a 19-year winning streak inside Washington State’s Beasley Coliseum. They’ll head to Seattle afterward, a nice city that has been nothing but mean to the Bruins. UCLA has lost eight straight on Washington’s home court going into Saturday’s game.

Next week, the lights will be a little brighter at the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas. Then Selection Sunday, March 17, will be upon us. The Bruins will hear their name called with a seed attached, and find out their first matchup and where to book flights.

That last part is the most important.

Before we get to why, let’s review where we are.

It’s finally safe to pen – not pencil – the Bruins (22-7, 12-4 Pac-12) into the NCAA Tournament field. They are on a four-game winning streak and recently earned a shiny No. 23 ranking. They are also in a tie for first place in the Pac-12 and will be competing for a conference championship in the final week of the regular season.

Coach Ben Howland won’t let his team look past the game at hand but since we now know this team will be headed to The Big Dance, it’s time to consider what the Bruins can do to improve their chances of advancing.

Luckily for the Bruins, they are on the rise as a team, and to even be in the NCAA Tournament discussion right now seemed like a long shot in November.

They could still do so much more, though, starting with a couple of wins against weak teams in Washington and following that up with a deep run in the Pac-12 Tournament, which would make their next destination a little more ideal.

If you’re like me, and I know I’m attracting a readership of degenerate gamblers, the only studying you do when the bracket is revealed during finals week every spring involves choosing upsets.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with how the NCAA sets up its 68-team, three-week drama of a tournament, here’s a crash course.

The supposedly neutral locations of the games are set well in advance. Eight cities will host the second and third rounds, four regional sites will host the Elite Eight and Sweet 16 and the place everyone wants to reach is Atlanta, where the Final Four and championship will be held.

Success in the bracket hinges on where you’re placed, literally and figuratively. A high seed helps, but so does location, location, location.

The selection committee helps with both. It usually rewards the top four seeds in each region with opening-round games close to their respective campuses. This is something Howland knows well. His three best UCLA teams not only all nabbed a top-four seed, they each got placed in the regional city closest to them.

This meant that they didn’t have to change the time much on their watches before the Final Four.

In 2006, the Bruins opened in San Diego and advanced to Oakland. The next year, they went from Sacramento to San Jose. The 2008 team won in Anaheim before leaving the state (gasp!) and doing the same in Phoenix.

This year’s team doesn’t remind me of those Final Four teams. It reminds me of the 2010-11 team. The one that had a lot of youth and showed growing pains in starting 5-4, including a horrible home loss to Montana, then bounced back with a stellar Pac-12 season and headed to Washington in the final week with a shot at the conference title.

I was feeling deja vu, and that was before I saw that The Bracket Project, a site that averages the various Internet projections for each team in the field, has this season’s Bruins as a No. 7 seed.

Two seasons ago, they were also a No. 7, which gets no preferential location treatment. The Bruins traveled across the country to Tampa, Fla. and won their first game before losing a virtual road game to No. 2-seeded Florida, which the committee pampered like they once did with UCLA.

Though these Bruins have been solid away from home, they don’t want to end up playing Michigan in Auburn Hills, Mich., or Louisville in Lexington, Ky., both plausible scenarios right now.

They could be a little more like the Final Four teams if they can close out the season strong and detour from the path of UCLA’s last tournament team. A start would be to get a sweep in Washington. The next step is to avoid tripping up in the conference tournament, like the 2010-11 Bruins did in a bad quarterfinal loss that cost them a few seed lines.

If these Bruins can rack up wins in the closing stretch, they can play their way to San Jose or Salt Lake City, where they’ve already been successful this season.

Staying a little closer to home would only help them dance a little farther.

E-mail Menezes at rmenezes@media.ucla.edu or tweet him at @ryanvmenezes.