STANFORD — Feel free to exhale.
Yes, UCLA still can’t shoot on the road. Yes, the Bruins went scoreless for long stretches of Thursday’s game.
And yes, they nearly blew it.
But for once it didn’t matter.
And for once, UCLA finally won a road game outside the city of Los Angeles.
After nearly blowing a double-digit lead, UCLA (14-9, 6-4 Pac-12) held on down the stretch to pull off the season sweep of Stanford (15-7, 6-4) with a 69-67 victory.
Senior guard Norman Powell topped 20 points for the fourth straight game and sophomore guards Isaac Hamilton and Bryce Alford added 18 apiece as the Bruins’ backcourt dominated for long stretches of the game.
All of it may have been for naught if Stanford’s guard Chasson Randle had connected on a game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer.
Instead, UCLA – who led by 22 with 11:23 left in the game – became the first team since Arizona to beat Stanford in Maples Pavilion en route to claiming an elusive road-conference win.
“A win’s a win. Ugly, pretty, blowout, close game, a win’s a win,” Powell said.
The game was nearly all that and more as the Bruins dominated for long stretches of play, only to be seemingly done in by familiar struggles.
UCLA jumped out to a 31-15 lead in the first half, thanks in part to the sharp shooting of Alford and Hamilton. The duo combined for 18 first-half points on 5-8 shooting from beyond-the-arc.
Hamilton, who struggled mightily in January, was impressive on both ends of the floor. After limiting Colorado’s guard Askia Booker to two points in the Bruins’ victory over the Buffs, Hamilton shut down Stanford’s Randle – the Pac-12’s leading scorer, for long periods of the game.
Randle – who had scored 20-plus points in six consecutive games and entered averaging 20.5 per game – had four at halftime and finished with 13 points on 4-13 shooting.
“After the first game I watched a lot of film on both (Booker and Randle), they are really good scorers and shooters as well,” Hamilton said. “I tried to make them uncomfortable as possible.”
The same can be said for the entire Stanford team coming out of the break. After closing the first half on a 10-0 run to cut the Bruins’ lead to 31-25, the Cardinal missed the first five shots of the second half and trailed 58-38 with less than 10 minutes remaining.
But the Cardinal caught fire in the game’s waning minutes with a dwindling Bruin lead as UCLA grew complacent.
“We didn’t know we were going to get that kind of lead but we knew they weren’t going to go away,” Alford said. “We got lazy, we can’t do that and that’s a lesson a young team like this needed.”
UCLA nearly learned it the hard way as habitual errors on the road plagued the Bruins’ performance during the Cardinal’s comeback.
As Stanford switched to a 1-3-1 zone, a UCLA offense that aggressively sought the basket coming out of halftime – Powell scored 15 of his 20 points in the second half, often by attacking the rim – became stagnant.
The Bruins missed their final six shots and scored just two points over the final 4:03 of play as Powell and Alford missed critical free throws in the game’s final minute, none bigger than Alford’s with 3.3 seconds remaining that gave the Cardinal one last shot to steal the victory.
Randle took the full-court inbounds pass and got a good look despite stumbling only to have the ball clank harmlessly off the rim.
“I was going to be sick if that went in,” Alford said.
Instead UCLA is just thankful to escape with a victory – one that moved them into a tie for third-place in the conference with Oregon, Stanford and Oregon St., and one on the road no less.
The task now is to do it again as UCLA heads to Cal with renewed tournament hopes. Not that the Bruins are paying any attention to that.
“Honestly we’re just looking for a sweep,” Powell said. “We’re going to get some rest and go down and focus on Cal. We’re not really worried about that standings right now, we’re just trying to get a win.”
After all, one was tough enough.