Steve Alford knows the importance of February in college basketball.
Last year, his Bruins closed up January with a 13-9 record and a reasonable shot at an NCAA Tournament bid, only to tumble out of tourney consideration by going 2-5 in February.
This season, as it prepares to face Washington State (11-10, 4-5) Wednesday, No. 11 UCLA (19-3, 6-3 Pac-12) has all but locked up a spot in the tournament, but that doesn’t change the need for a strong month, Alford said.
“We’re in a really good position as far as wins, but it’s the month of February that you really try to put everything together and gain a lot of momentum that takes you into March,” Alford said Monday.
As good as their record is, the Bruins enter February with a lot to prove. Once in contention for a No. 1 seed in the tournament, UCLA is now a No. 4 seed in ESPN’s latest bracket predictions.
When they face the Cougars on Wednesday, the Bruins will not only be looking to snap a two-game losing streak, but also to find answers to the many questions that have arisen during the skid.
The defense hasn’t been great all year, but it seemed perhaps passable until UCLA hemorrhaged points in its 96-85 loss to Arizona. Then, after the team spent last week focused on getting stops, the offense turned the ball over 17 times in an 84-76 loss at USC.
The loss to the Trojans brought up another possible issue. Dealing with the most adversity they’ve faced this season, the Bruins “split ways,” as freshman point guard Lonzo Ball put it.
“We dealt with some adversity and instead of coming together as a group like you want, we went in our own little shells and got a little quiet as a team,” said senior guard Bryce Alford, who led a players-only meeting afterwards.
Luckily, the schedule was kind to the Bruins, giving them an open weekend when they needed it most, allowing them to take two days off from practice and film.
“I think we needed mentally, more than anything, to get away from basketball a little bit and kind of reboot everything that we want to do,” Steve Alford said. “The meetings and what’s taken place on the practice court so far have been great.”
This week’s road trip won’t include any elite competition – neither Washington State nor Washington (9-12, 2-7) is a top-100 team in KenPom.com’s rankings – but both opponents will provide some form of a challenge.
The Huskies have freshman point guard Markelle Fultz, the lone college player consistently slotted ahead of Ball in NBA mock drafts, and the Cougars have an experienced starting five that features multiple scoring threats.
Washington State’s go-to option is 6-foot-10 forward Josh Hawkinson, who averages a double-double with 16.1 points and 10.0 rebounds per game.
With both Hawkinson and 7-foot center Conor Clifford in the starting lineup, Washington State posts up more than any other team in the Pac-12. It’s for good reason – the Cougars are the sixth-most efficient post-up team in the country, averaging 1.06 points per possession.
Hawkinson is also a threat to shoot from beyond the arc, though the team’s most dangerous 3-point option is freshman guard Malachi Flynn.
Flynn, a three-star recruit from Tacoma, Washington, has emerged as a dangerous offensive weapon, drilling 44.6 percent of his 3-point attempts while also showing the ability to get to the basket with an effective hesitation dribble.
He should provide Ball with a decent warm-up for Saturday’s highly anticipated match-up with Fultz.
The game against the Cougars will similarly serve as a warm-up for a month that Steve Alford said will define the Bruins’ season.
“If we want to have a fun-filled March, we’ve got to do a lot of work here in February,” he said.
Staying Confident
Bryce Alford said the focus of the Bruins’ players-only meeting was both to encourage communication and to reinstill the mindset the Bruins played with for much of the season.
“It was just kind of a reminder of, hey, we’ve hit a little slump here, we’ve hit a bump in the road, but stay confident in how we’ve gotten to this point because it’s not like we’ve changed personnel,” Bryce Alford said. “Just having fun and playing, I think that’s what’s going to help us moving forward.”
Senior guard Isaac Hamilton said director of operations Tyus Edney told the team about a similar meeting during UCLA’s 1995 championship season in which the Bruins committed to playing better defense.
“They put a stamp on defense – no easy buckets,” Hamilton said. “They called the paint the ‘red zone,’ and they had, similar to what we had, a little team meeting with just the players and they said, ‘No buckets in the red zone.’”