Thirty-foot airballs are not the only whiffs that occur beyond the 3-point line.
With 6 minutes left in the game against USC, Jaylen Hands caught a pass 30 feet from the hoop and dribbled to the right wing.
Freshman center Moses Brown set a screen to the right of the sophomore guard, so Hands opted to attack that direction.
The only problem was Hands’ defender was behind Brown, and the freshman was screening thin air.
While adjusting to pace, physicality and defense are trademarks of the transition from high school to the collegiate level, UCLA men’s basketball’s overall youth and inexperience also affects some of the sport’s staple actions – setting screens and running the pick and roll.
“It’s a learning experience,” Hands said. “Sometimes it’s the bigs’ (fault), sometimes it’s my fault. Sometimes I walk too quickly or I turn (the screen) down.”
Brown receives a decent portion of the coaching staff’s attention when it talks about setting proper screens, but redshirt freshman forwards Cody Riley and Jalen Hill are also occasionally guilty.
When the shot clock winds down to single digits, most teams will run a simple variation of a high ball screen to give their ballhandler an edge over his defender.
“We set that high ball screen a lot for a guy like Hands,” said interim coach Murry Bartow. “You want a solid screen, but you certainly don’t want an illegal screen and a moving screen. So there’s kind of a fine line there between the two.”
But when the screener fails to make contact at all with the defender, the offense runs into trouble.
The screener’s defender could spring a two-man trap, or more commonly, the ballhandler’s defender simply repositions himself between the ball and the hoop.
In both cases, the offense is back to square one with even less time on the shot clock.
When 7-foot-1-inch Brown first joined UCLA, former coach Steve Alford raved about the freshman’s ability to catch lobs and play above the rim.
That skill can only come into play if Brown learns to body up Hands’ defender with a screen, setting up a two-on-one situation with an athletic point guard and a dunk machine against an opposing lumbering big man.
“With the bigs, it’s definitely emphasized because we haven’t screened well,” said sophomore guard Kris Wilkes. “Especially (Brown) and (UCLA’s forwards) haven’t set real good screens, but (the coaches are) working on it with them.”
Bruins on the Bench
Bartow hasn’t been shy using the bench as a motivational tool – he pulled Hands following a missed 3-pointer early in the shot clock with UCLA facing an eight-point deficit against Arizona State with just under five minutes remaining.
Against Arizona, sophomore guard Chris Smith only played 2 minutes the entire game after picking up a foul and turning the ball over twice. Smith started the Bruins’ first five games of Bartow’s interim tenure.
Given how deep UCLA’s rotation currently is with redshirt junior forward Alex Olesinski back in uniform, Bartow may feel more liberty to bench his players who aren’t performing up to his standards.
“We’ve got 10 or 11 guys that we feel good about going into the game,” Bartow said. “We don’t make a big deal about it, but if a guy’s not playing well then it’s not so much demoting them, it’s just playing the other guys.”