EUGENE, Ore. — Call it Jordan Adams jumping to the right place at the right time. Call it sound positioning in the paint.
Call it a fortuitous held ball that resuscitated UCLA after a disastrous closing stretch, in which a seven-point Bruin lead vanished to near heartbreak.
In a 70-68 UCLA victory over Oregon at Matthew Knight Arena on Thursday, it was coach Steve Alford who eerily called the play in which his sophomore guard saved the day. With a tied game at 68 apiece and 37 seconds left on the clock, the Bruins huddled, knowing it was now or never. Surrendering possession without a timeout to think things over would make things difficult. That much Alford made clear.
“Coach – like when we ran out of timeouts – he looked at me for some odd reason and said, ‘the next jump ball is ours,’” Adams said. “I initially grabbed it just to tie it up. If he didn’t tell me that I might have missed out on it.”
An arrow in the Bruins’ direction, after a missed long jump shot by sophomore guard/forward Kyle Anderson, turned Alford’s eye contact into a game-saving bull’s-eye. Instead of nervously defending Oregon’s final shot, UCLA got one more of its own. That much Travis Wear took advantage of.
“It fell into my hands, and I knew there were only a few seconds left so I put it up,” said the redshirt senior forward.
Wear’s short-range floater danced around the rim, then dropped in with 5.1 seconds remaining. Oregon’s final play proved a dud of a last-second heave and UCLA, after leading by 11 points with 6:10 to play, out-clutched the Ducks to escape with their third-straight Pac-12 victory.
That much was Adams’ undertaking.
A coroner could have all but called UCLA after sophomore forward/center Tony Parker fouled over the back of Oregon forward Richard Amardi with 1:14 remaining. Parker, who fouled out on the play, clutched his head in between his hands and took a defeated squat. He talked angrily at himself and tugged at his jersey. All he could do was watch as nearly 9,000 fans erupted at Amardi’s made free throws.
Trailing by three, Adams simply attacked the basket, trading woe-is-me for wonderful. A rewarding whistle for his aggression, followed by his final point of the game from the charity stripe, evened the score at 68 and erased any UCLA despair less than 20 seconds after all hope was apparently lost.
“I saw the guy kind of jump at me so I had to turn and throw my body into him,” said Adams, who scored a team-high 19 points, 14 of them coming in the second half. “It’s tight, so the refs might call it, so I just went for it.”
What the Bruins nearly lost Thursday night was positive trends. Against the Ducks, Travis Wear found his mid-range jumper, going 5-for-8 from the field and netting his highest scoring total of the season with 12 points. Junior guard Norman Powell jump-started UCLA’s running offense behind 14 second-half points and played a major role in stymieing Oregon (14-6, 2-6 Pac-12) guard Joseph Young, who largely fell silent after 16 first-half points.
After falling just short in its last road contest against Utah, UCLA (17-4, 6-2 Pac-12) finally managed to salvage its efforts. At least until Sunday’s game at Oregon State, UCLA can say it made it out of the woods in Eugene, Ore. unscathed and satisfied.
“It’s a tough place to win. I thought with Norman, Travis on that putback and Jordan, the effort plays that they had were huge,” said Alford. “I thought we made the plays down the stretch, especially defensively. We got the stops we needed to get late in the game.”
That much, as an elated Bruin team showed, practically hopping off the court after the game, was an understatement.