In the first four years of Ben Howland’s tenure as men’s basketball coach, UCLA’s postseason finishes have stretched from missing the tournament his first year to making it to the championship game and Final Four in his third and fourth years, respectively.
After only losing guard Arron Afflalo from last year’s Final Four team and adding freshman center and missing piece to the UCLA puzzle Kevin Love, expectations have not been this high in Westwood since Steve Lavin’s first years at UCLA in the late ’90s.
The team has the good guard play of the previous two Final Four teams, with Darren Collison and Russell Westbrook manning the backcourt, and finally an interior offensive presence in Love, who changes the dynamics of the offense.
But there are issues heading into the final stretch.
With four games left in the Pac-10 schedule, the Bruins have some serious kinks they need to work out on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball if they are to make the same kind of run they have the past two years.
OFFENSE: It appears that as the UCLA offense goes, so goes Love’s frustration. When the offense is effective, the Bruins manage to get the freshman center the ball; when the offense is stagnant, Love goes possession after possession fighting for position and not even getting a look.
While Love has been doubled more often in recent games, UCLA needs to find a way to get the ball to him, whether it is on the high post, low post or perimeter. There has been no sustained attempt to work out a high-low game with Luc Richard Mbah a Moute making the entry pass to Love from the high post. Entry passes have come almost strictly from the perimeter, which has made it easier for Love to be doubled either by the passer’s man sagging onto him or the second post player moving to him.
Of course, Love would also be open for an entry pass more often if UCLA started making 3s, which would force opposing teams to guard farther away from the basket and thus give Love more space.
The offense also could possibly be made more effective by taking the ball out of Collison’s hands more often. Westbrook has been an effective distributor all year and is actually averaging more assists than Collison, despite handling the ball a great deal less. But Collison’s incessant dribbling may not be as much of a problem with him as a player as it is with Howland’s offense: Even when Jordan Farmar was the point guard, overdribbling without initiating the offense was a hallmark of Howland’s system.
DEFENSE: Defensively, the Bruins are well off their performances of the last two years under Howland, and that can, in a lot of ways, be attributed to the addition of Love.
While the freshman center has made great strides as a defensive player, he still struggles at times to hedge effectively on ball screens. Also, UCLA’s doubling and switching have not been as effective as in recent years because it appears they are slower to rotate. A better defensive focus to begin games would help, but with Love being a lot slower and considerably less athletic than former starter and current backup Lorenzo Mata-Real, the Bruins just have less-defensive personnel than in previous years ““ despite the fact that Westbrook may actually be an improvement over Afflalo, who was a tenacious defender but lacked in athleticism.
Still, with only two real guards getting playing time, the Bruins’ defense cannot sustain the 40 minutes of intensity as they have in the past.
The Bruins will head to the Arizona schools this weekend and then follow with home games against Cal and Stanford to end the regular season. With three losses already, one of them against a bad Washington team, the Bruins will probably need to win out the regular season to be assured of a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Last year, the Bruins stumbled into the postseason, losing their regular season finale to Washington and then losing in the Pac-10 Tournament, only to go on to the Final Four. Two years ago, they went into the NCAA Tournament winners of seven straight and made it to the championship game.
This year? Perhaps they will show another method of surviving the Madness.