CORVALLIS, Ore. — Even an hour before UCLA men’s basketball tipped off its game at Oregon State Thursday night, it was clear things were not going to go as planned.
As the Bruins shuffled out of the tunnels in their warmup gear to loosen up and hoist some practice shots, noticeably absent from the gaggle of blue and yellow jumpsuits was junior forward/center Tony Parker.
A key part of UCLA’s three-game winning streak and seemingly an integral player for a Bruin team facing a challenging defensive team in the Beavers, Parker – thought be a game-time decision as he dealt with back spasms – was instead at home in Westwood.
Little else seemed to go the Bruins’ way once the game started as UCLA struggled to score and to dictate the speed of the game in its 66-55 loss to Oregon State, snapping its winning streak in the process.
The loss of Parker didn’t seem quite so dire right after UCLA’s first possession.
After winning the tip, the Bruins opened the game by running a play for freshman center Thomas Welsh, making his first career start as Parker’s replacement. Welsh drained the first shot of the game, a turnaround baseline jumper.
Then, things began going south for the Bruins.
As Oregon State slowed the pace down to its desired tempo, UCLA’s ability to score was cranked down in unison. The Bruins made just one of their next 16 field goal attempts, falling behind 13-6 and earning their first-half play a “soft” description from coach Steve Alford after the game.
Given UCLA’s icy offensive start, the game almost seemed on track to be reminiscent of the team’s Dec. 20 blowout loss to Kentucky in which UCLA missed its first 17 shots and trailed 41-7 at halftime. The Beavers’ own lackluster offensive start was all that kept the Bruins in the game early.
A pair of free throws from sophomore guard Bryce Alford followed by a 3-pointer and a dunk by senior guard Norman Powell tied the game at 13 with just under eight minutes left in the first half.
Then the Beavers’ dormant offense exploded.
Junior guard Gary Payton II scored 11 straight points for Oregon State to push his team ahead 29-19 by halftime.
“The first half, it was the Payton show,” Steve Alford said. “I thought he dominated the game every way you could do it.”
The loss of Parker seemed to have a wide-reaching negative effect on the Bruins in the first half. Without his physicality in the paint, UCLA struggled with its interior defense, allowing several open layups, and its inside scoring.
Perhaps even more detrimental was how the absence of Parker altered the Bruins’ offensive tendencies. After finally figuring out during its three-game winning streak that the offense functioned better when Parker and freshman forward Kevon Looney were the focal points, the Bruins relapsed Thursday.
Instead of looking to feed the ball inside, UCLA settled for jump shots, launching 11 3-pointers in the first half and hitting just one of them.
“We weren’t able to get the ball inside like we want, but obviously (Parker’s) been a big part of that,” Steve Alford said. “Part of it’s (Parker) and part of it is zone. Zone makes it a little bit harder to do that.”
After falling behind by 17 coming out of halftime, UCLA finally made up ground late in the second half as it figured out how to beat Oregon State’s 2-3 zone defense. In the first half, the Bruins’ ball movement was ineffective, swinging passes around the perimeter which allowed the Beavers to easily force contested jump shots, Powell said.
But UCLA fixed that late in the game, passing the ball inside then back out to the perimeter, forcing Oregon State’s defenders to move and creating open 3-pointers.
Those 3s finally began to fall.
From the 9:09 mark to the 5:09 mark, UCLA made five of its six shots – three of which were 3-pointers – to draw within five. A pair of free throws made it a 3-point game.
Suddenly, the game felt more like a duplicate of UCLA’s comeback double overtime win against Stanford than its blowout loss to Kentucky. In all but the score, that is.
The Bruins drew within two, but this time they couldn’t find the stops or scores when they needed them and ran out of time to make the comeback and make up for their sluggish first half.
“Top to bottom, this league is too good to take 20 minutes off,” Bryce Alford said. “You can’t score 19 points in a half and expect to beat too many teams.”
UCLA’s stretch of improved play ended alongside its winning streak Thursday, but the Bruins don’t expect it to be gone for long, as they hope to apply the lessons they learned from Thursday’s loss to Saturday’s matchup at Oregon.
“(We have to) really have a short term memory,” Powell said. “We’ve been on a losing streak before and we know how to battle back and fight and this team has a lot of that.”