The UCLA men’s basketball team has been in this situation before, facing a top-10 team at Pauley Pavilion.
The game occurred on the first Thursday of December, against then-No. 1 Kentucky. It turned out to be one of the Bruins’ best games in recent memory, as they led for more than 38 minutes and captured an 87-77 upset win.
On the first Thursday of this month, UCLA (9-6, 0-2 Pac-12) will host yet another top-10 team. This time, the opponent will be No. 7 Arizona (13-1, 1-0).
The situation is the same, but the message from coach Steve Alford is slightly different. Before the Kentucky game, Alford told reporters that he wanted to guard his team against getting too hyped up by the high-profile atmosphere. He didn’t want the sell-out crowd or the magnitude of the game to lead to recklessness or sloppy play.
“We’re gonna have a gold out, I think we’re gonna have a sold-out arena,” Alford said Dec. 1, two days before the game. “I don’t want them getting too ramped up too quickly.”
This time around, following two lackluster losses to unranked teams in Washington, the main thing Alford wants from his team is intensity and energy. If the Bruins get a little too amped up early on, Alford is OK with that. He just wants to see the effort.
“Well coming off (the loss) at Washington State, I want to get them extra hyped up,” Alford said on Tuesday. “We can deal with the other things. If we have mistakes offensively, if we’ve got mistakes defensively, that’s all part of the game … But that passion, that’s gotta be there all the time.”
Passion was basically absent from UCLA’s performance Sunday night in Pullman, Washington. Alford called his team “soft” after the game. That UCLA team on Sunday looked nothing like the one that defeated Kentucky exactly a month earlier.
While Alford’s squad has been enigmatic throughout this young season, defeating perennial powerhouses like Kentucky and Gonzaga, it also played close games with mid-major teams like Monmouth, Long Beach State, Louisiana Lafayette and Cal Poly. UCLA has shown that it can compete with – and beat – top-25 programs, it just hasn’t shown the consistency to maintain a top-25 rank of its own.
Going forward, if UCLA is going to challenge Arizona in Pac-12 play, junior guard Bryce Alford said that the remedy to this up-and-down trend is finding the balance between too much energy and too much composure. The Bruins have at times this year been too aggressive, causing a turnover epidemic, but they’ve also been too lax at times, playing down to lower competition.
“Something I’ve had to learn over the past year is when to go and when not to go, when to be going really hard at it and when to pace yourself a little bit,” Alford said. “I think that’s something I did well against Kentucky and I think our whole team did (well). I think we did really well on the road against Gonzaga (with) that.”
It’s almost a given that the Bruins will come out with aggression and energy on Thursday, playing their Pac-12 home opener on ESPN2 before NBA All-Star alum Russell Westbrook and his Oklahoma City Thunder teammates. The question is: Can the Bruins uphold that energy while also maintaining their poise down the stretch? They did that against Kentucky and Gonzaga, but squandered an early lead against No. 7 North Carolina Dec. 19, committing numerous turnovers and defensive errors down the stretch.
“I mean, just due to who (the Wildcats) are – a top-10 team – I guess guys will come in and compete,” said junior guard Isaac Hamilton. “Right from the tip, (we need to) get on these guys and try to be as aggressive as we can.”
If there’s one top-25 game where the Bruins can afford to be a little overaggressive, it may be on Thursday. The Wildcats rank No. 27 in scoring defense, allowing just 67.3 points per game, but they rank No. 209 in turnovers forced per game.