The Bruins may have been on Cloud Nine for quite some time, but
this past weekend served as a reality check.
The UCLA women’s basketball team realized it can’t
take any team lightly, and it can’t rely on talent alone.
But that realization came too late, as the 25th-ranked Bruins
played complacent and lax basketball and paid severely for it,
losing to Arizona State 44-42 on Friday and getting trounced by
Arizona 84-73 on Sunday.
After winning their opening five conference games, the
Bruins’ 10-game home win streak was finally snapped, and
their undefeated conference record was finally blemished.
“The Pac-10 is so competitive, so deep this year, you
can’t take a break any night,” UCLA coach Kathy Olivier
said. “We learned that this week, that’s for sure. The
hard way.”
Getting swept by the Arizona schools was only part of the pain
endured by UCLA this weekend.
Sophomore Noelle Quinn sustained a left knee injury in the
waning moments of the first half against Arizona on Sunday, when
she was undercut by 5-foot-4 guard Jessica Arnold.
Quinn was in considerable pain and needed the assistance of
players and trainers to be lifted off the court and into locker
room. She will have an MRI conducted on the knee early in the
week.
“I came down and my leg just locked, I stepped, and it
hurt,” said Quinn, who returned to the game early in the
second half. “I can’t even tell you what
happened.”
After Quinn was lifted off the court with 5:14 left in the first
half, the Bruins managed to scrape four points at the intermission.
But the Wildcats pounced on the Bruins in the opening minutes of
the second half. Applying a zone defense, Arizona was able to jump
out on a 22-5 run.
“We got a little down, and Arizona took advantage,”
Olivier said. “(UCLA) is a very close basketball team; they
care for each other so much. They were bummed, they were saddened
(when Quinn went down) and that may have thrown us off a little
bit.”
Arizona senior guard Dee-Dee Wheeler single-handedly dismantled
the Bruins during the second half and picked up 19 points, seven
rebounds and 11 assists on the day.
Despite not being at full strength, UCLA did nibble away at an
Arizona lead that had grown to as much as 23 points. In the final
10 minutes of play, junior Lisa Willis sank four 3-pointers and
finished with a game-high 24 points. But UCLA would not get any
closer than seven points.
“You have to give them a lot of credit,” Arizona
coach Joan Bonvicini said. “Here we had a big lead, and they
never put their head down. It looked like (Lisa Willis) was hitting
from downtown Pasadena for a while.”
The Bruins shot the ball poorly in the two games, firing at just
23 percent from the field against Arizona State. Facing a zone
defense, UCLA relied mostly on outside jumpers that were not
falling.
“I’ve never played a zone against them,” Blue
said. “It was strange for them to play a zone and slow the
tempo down.”
Quinn finished with a meager eight points in the contest, going
2-for-13 from the field, and was held scoreless in the first half
for the first time in her career. The two teams combined for an
abysmal 86 points, the lowest aggregate total in Pauley Pavilion
history.
“They just weren’t falling; that’s what
happens when you play an aggressive team like that,” Quinn
said. “It was tough for me to get into a groove with their
zone. It was so compacted in there. We were preparing for them to
go man; the zone kind of caught us off guard.”