Through the first 10 minutes of Saturday’s game, it felt like anything was possible for the UCLA offense.
Senior guard Michael Roll was hitting from the outside. Freshman forward Tyler Honeycutt was slamming the ball home off elegant passes around Cal defenders. Freshman forward Reeves Nelson even had an acrobatic finish on a fast break.
And then the whole machine just shut down.
“When they started heating us up with their pressure, we did not do a good job of handling their defense,” UCLA coach Ben Howland said.
UCLA did not make a field goal in the final 6:56 of the first half, paving the way for Cal to turn a 14-point UCLA lead to a 7-point Cal advantage.
The streak was due in large part to a heightened intensity by the Bears’ guards, who swarmed the perimeter and forced the Bruins into 16 turnovers on the day, including a critical shot clock violation in that first-half scoring lapse.
Howland attributed some of the drought to simply poor shot selection.
“We ended up taking some quick bad shots, which is something we’ve talked about in the past,” he said, referring to last month’s losses to Stanford and USC. “It was disappointing that we fell back into that mode.”
The offense that looked so dynamic in its 77-73 win against Stanford on Thursday, when the team had 19 assists to just five turnovers, struggled to find a rhythm on Saturday.
“We had a big win on Thursday, and we should have been really, really excited for this opportunity today,” Howland said.
Roll remarked on the difference in energy level between the two teams once the Bears made a game of it.
“We slipped up,” Roll said. “I don’t think our intensity was that high.”
Dragovic’s struggles in return
Senior Nikola Dragovic took another step toward cementing his role as the streakiest player on the team with a poor performance on Saturday. After five straight games scoring in double figures, including a game-high 19 at Oregon, the forward fell flat once again against California.
“Nik obviously didn’t have a good game today,” Howland said afterward.
Dragovic went 1-for-8 from the floor and even missed back-to-back free throws at a key point midway through the second half while the Bruins were trying to mount a comeback.
It has been a rocky season for Dragovic, with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office filing an assault charge on him back in November. It led to a two-game suspension from the team and a string of especially sub-par shooting games.
It seemed the worst of those troubles might have been over, however. The long-range ability that defines his game had been making a comeback of its own this Pac-10 season, moving Dragovic to the team points leader during that stretch.
But Saturday, it was not there for the 6-foot-9-inch wingman. Howland, who has not wavered in his commitment to his senior captain, kept Dragovic on the court for all but nine minutes of the game. When he came out though, the Bruins’ offense took the pace up a notch and did start making some plays.
“When we took him out … that’s actually when we made our run,” Howland said. “We had (sophomore guard) Jerime (Anderson) in there, and we actually had better pressure up there on the ball. That lineup was a key to us getting back into this game today.”
Nelson suffers concussion
Reeves Nelson received a concussion when he knocked heads with Cal’s junior center Markhuri Sanders-Frison on an early possession, Nelson said after the game.
“I was lying to the trainers just to stay in the game,” Nelson told Jon Gold of the Los Angeles Daily News. “Obviously I didn’t play as well as I would have liked, but I tried to stay in there for the team.”
Nelson followed up a team-leading 18-point performance in Thursday’s victory with just six points and two rebounds against California on Saturday. Howland said he planned to give the team two days of rest to start the week, but the team’s leading rebounder said he might have to miss an extra day of practice to fully recover.