The UCLA men’s basketball team found a way to make a bad Bruin sports weekend far, far worse.
The football team wasn’t expected to beat USC on Saturday.
The basketball team was certainly expected to blow out Montana the next day.
Which team played worse?
Fans seemed to think they played about equal.
“Just like football,” a small group of disgruntled fans yelled moments after booing UCLA junior guard Jerime Anderson for committing a turnover.
The football season is finished now, and for all intents and purposes, the basketball season might be, too.
“It’s a bad loss,” said coach Ben Howland after the game. “This was a nightmare deal.”
In the weeks past, Howland seemed convinced that the bad losses were a thing of the past.
But three days after playing its best game of the season ““ a one-point loss on the road to No. 4 Kansas ““ and one day after fans put a painful football season to rest, the basketball team opened huge new wounds.
“We don’t plan on losing,” junior guard Lazeric Jones said. “It’s terrible. I really hate losing. I’m sick right now.”
Without a signature out-of-conference win and now a bad loss to a Big Sky team, 66-57, UCLA’s tournament resume looks like chopped liver.
And the Pac-10 season hasn’t even started.
“The way we played, I think we took this team too lightly,” junior guard Malcolm Lee said.
UCLA did just about everything poorly Sunday. “Poor,” in fact was Howland’s word of choice. The Bruins held the lead for less than two minutes all game; they turned the ball over 16 times; they simply looked flat.
“We had such a poor effort,” Howland said, shaking his head. “Our defense was very poor tonight. … We really did a poor job getting the ball inside. … Maybe I did a poor job scheduling.”
He sighed momentarily.
“I don’t know.”
The Bruins shot only 27 percent in the second half and 31 percent for the game ““ totally unable to penetrate the Grizzlies’ zone. They missed layups, missed jump shots and had only two points in transition after working all year to play up-tempo.
And on the defensive end, the Bruins again failed to stop dribble penetration.
Montana sophomore guard Will Cherry slashed through the UCLA defense all night and scored a game-high 18 points.
“We weren’t starstruck by Pauley Pavilion,” Cherry said.
“Yesterday in practice Coach told us, “˜You know the Bruins, they’re not unbeatable.’ We could see it in their eyes stop after stop, layup after layup, foul after foul. It looked like they were ready to give up.”
And what few fans did brave the rain to sit in a half-full Pauley Pavilion were not appreciative of UCLA’s lack of effort.
They booed the Bruins as they walked off the court, shoulders slouched, heads hung.
“We heard them,” Lee said. “We deserve the boos. Our fans come to watch us play and we didn’t give them a good showing. A lot of people thought we would play hard … and we did the exact opposite.”
With reports by Eli Smukler, Bruin Sports senior staff.