Defense key to victory for UCLA men’s hoops
Cameron Dollar offers spark off the bench for Cal and Stanford
games
By Randy Satterburg
Daily Bruin Staff
Defense wins championships.
At least that’s what they say in football. We’ll find out if
it’s true on Super Sunday when the 49ers and Chargers hook up in
Miami.
The UCLA men’s basketball team is applying the same theory to
the hardwood, where the Bruins are opening up eyes with a series of
scrappy defensive efforts during their recent five-game winning
streak.
There will be another SoCal-NorCal match-up this weekend in
addition to the Super Bowl  albeit slightly less-watched, but
some would say more interesting  as UCLA hosts California and
Stanford, hoping to continue its winning ways with defense.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Combined with last year, the Bruins have held 18 opponents to
under 40 percent from the field and are 17-1 in those games Â
the lone loss being this season’s loss at Oregon when the Ducks
shot 37.1 percent and won.
And UCLA has done it against some pretty good basketball
teams.
This year alone the Bruins have already held three top-15 teams
to absurdly poor shooting performances, and several top individual
players to uncharacteristically low scoring outputs. UCLA’s defense
first drew notice for the number it did on Kentucky (39.7 %), then
the Bruins quieted any talk of that performance being an aberration
by clamping down even harder on Arizona (35.4) and Arizona State
(37.9) in following weeks.
In those three games, UCLA also held each team’s leading scorer
 Tony Delk, Damon Stoudamire and Mario Bennett respectively
 beneath their averages for the year.
"I have liked the way we played defensively the last three
games," UCLA head coach Jim Harrick said at his weekly press
conference Tuesday. "We’re better than we were defensively a year
ago. We’ve got good depth, so that helps us. And we’ve used our
limbs a lot better  our hands and arms  which is a key
factor."
Those active limbs are particularly useful in the context of
Harrick’s desire to double-down on the ball in the post, which he
thinks has been the key to both UCLA road wins against Arizona in
recent years.
"It takes care of the red zone and makes sure that if you get
beat, you get beat outside," Harrick said. "If you win the battle
inside you usually get more points, rebounds and free throws as a
result."
* * *
Sophomore guard Cameron Dollar has not only been a cosummate
team player while accepting his role as one of the first players
off the bench, he has flourished in it. Dollar was replaced in the
starting lineup by freshman J.R. Henderson after the seventh game
of the season  not for lack of ability, but instead to give
the Bruins more versatility and some added scoring punch.
On the Arizona road trip Dollar earned raves for his
defense.
"I thought Cameron Dollar came in and really did a nice job. He
turned the Washington State game around (two weeks ago) and he
really helped us at Arizona (last weekend)," Harrick said. "He
guarded Stoudamire a while, went to other guys and really did a
nice job helping us inside defensively, and then certainly against
Arizona State he did the same thing when he made an interception,
took a charge, stripped the ball from Mario Bennett on the baseline
 he was everywhere."
* * *
Speaking of omnipresent guards, Toby Bailey has turned out to be
quite a recruiting coup for Harrick and his staff. In a year of
high school basketball that was overflowing with talented guards in
the West region  Trajan Langdon (Duke), Ricky Price (Duke),
Cameron Murray (USC), Miles Simon (Arizona) and Jelani Gardner
(Cal) just to name a few  the highly coveted Bailey made his
decision to come to UCLA before some of the other seniors, whom
UCLA was also recruiting, had made up their minds.
"I’m glad I got the guy I got," Harrick said emphatically with a
ear to ear grin on his face.