Most of UCLA men’s basketball’s goals this season have fallen by the wayside.
The Bruins no longer have a chance to win the Pac-12 regular season title. They missed out on their attempt to topple their rival, the Arizona Wildcats. They were unable to sweep a road trip, instead getting swept themselves in three of the four two-game road series in Pac-12 play.
Most, but not all. With two games – both at home – left in the regular season, UCLA is looking to remain undefeated at home against conference opponents.
The first half of that challenge comes Sunday night when UCLA (17-12, 9-7 Pac-12) takes on Washington State (12-15, 6-9) at Pauley Pavilion.
“To go undefeated at home, that’s been a goal of theirs the whole year,” said coach Steve Alford.
Doing so will also likely accomplish another goal: earning a top-four finish in the conference standings and a first-round bye in the Pac-12 tournament. Locked in a tight battle with Oregon State and Stanford for fourth-place, UCLA will have to be perfect and wait for the cards out of its control to fall where they may.
“If we can finish well, our resume is gonna look a lot better a week from now if we can continue to do some things,” Alford said. “So we’ve just got to take care of what we can take care of.”
On paper, taking care of Washington State looks like a manageable task. The Cougars have improved this season, but still ended up on the wrong end of the scoreboard in eight of their past 11 games. Sitting near the bottom of the standings, the Cougars, as Alford said, have no pressure on them.
The Bruins, meanwhile, will be in yet another “can’t lose” scenario, as a defeat would almost certainly kill their chance at a first-round bye in the conference tournament and their chance at an invitation to the NCAA tournament. They’ve chosen to view this added pressure and sense of urgency as a positive.
“Coach talked to us about it after the Arizona game and I think that it’s great we’re in the position we are,” said senior guard Norman Powell. “We control our own destiny, we have a chance to go undefeated at home in the conference season and set up what we want to do in the Pac-12 tournament, so there’s a lot of motivation.”
More kindling to fuel that fire is that UCLA, despite its tumultuous season, has a chance to finish just one game behind its Pac-12 record last year. In 2014, the Bruins went 12-6 to finish second in the conference. Should UCLA get two wins to close out the 2015 season, it would finish 11-7 in the Pac-12 and filled with confidence knowing it nearly replicated last season’s results despite losing nearly all its key players to the NBA.
Before that can happen, however, the Bruins still need those two wins.
After their 22-point blowout victory over the Washington Huskies Wednesday, the Bruins’ said their focus for their final two games isn’t to get lopsided wins to impress the NCAA selection committee, but rather to just make sure they do win.
“Really we just gotta win. Doesn’t matter how we do it. We just gotta win, that’s just the bottom line,” said junior forward/center Tony Parker. “I don’t think too much of style points and all that really matter to them. … If it was style points, we’d be a No. 1 seed.”