UCLA Defends Its Turf

The emotion sucked the air right out of Pauley Pavilion.

This is how things should be at Pauley. The fans frantic and the UCLA players full of themselves, controlling the tempo, making the opponent obey.

UCLA kids who have heard ugly rumors and watched their athletic director undermine their coach, went out to play basketball Thursday night without a care in the world.

That’s how it seemed for awhile.

Eagerly running and pressing all over the floor, forcing USC to eat its dust, UCLA built a 19-point lead over the Trojans. And the Bruins did upset No. 19 USC, 80-75. How weird does that sound, UCLA upsetting USC? But the ending, the desperate way the Bruins had to hold on, showed why UCLA basketball is in the middle of a muddle over who should be its coach.

For 35 minutes, UCLA fans, alums, students, even casual observers got the kind of UCLA performance they expect all of the time and the kind they have gotten almost none of the time at Pauley this season.

That’s the thing about kids. They can ignore all of the stuff.

Stuff such as having their athletic director, Pete Dalis, embarrass himself, his basketball coach and the man voted most likely to be coaching at Nevada Las Vegas, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky and UCLA next season, Rick Pitino.

When Dalis told the media about conversations with Pitino before he told Steve Lavin, it was the worst kind of betrayal. It was a betrayal of confidence with Pitino. It was a betrayal of trust in Lavin, the man he has given one of the treasures of college basketball, the UCLA tradition.

So now Pitino is angry, Lavin is left looking clueless and without any authority or longevity. And the Bruins played better basketball, basketball with more passion and enthusiasm than we had a right to expect. For awhile.

If they are trying to save their coach’s job, the Bruins did well. Not as well as Dalis, who probably has run Pitino off to UNLV, where Pitino probably will win national titles and fill an arena every night. But, still, he did well. So did some of the USC players.

It’s hard to separate fact and fiction right now. In the hours leading up to the game, playing on various radio talk shows, were reports of UCLA players who want Lavin fired as soon as possible and other reports that Pitino is still talking to UCLA and still others that Pitino will never talk to UCLA again.

But when the game started, when the talking stopped and the playing began, the Bruins heard nothing but the sound of squeaking shoes and the heavy breathing of the Trojans, who kept trying to break the UCLA press by running as fast as possible and throwing the ball as far as possible and mostly turning it over, 28 times in all.

Yet, emotion carries you only so far. Then college players need to rely on coaching, on what they have learned every day in practice. They have to think about what to do when they have a 19-point lead on their home court, about how to guard every offensive possession, about how to smash the cross-town rival, not encourage it.

Lavin took blame, as he always does, about what happened at the end. “Our shot selection was very poor after we got the big lead,” he said. “Our understanding of time left and the score was very poor. And I take responsibility for that.”

When the emotion went away, so did UCLA’s lead. Bit by bit until, at the end, the Bruins needed two unassisted turnovers by two Trojan backups in the last three minutes to hold on. They needed Tyler Murphy and Robert Hutchinson to bounce the ball off their feet and out of bounds on back-to-back possessions when USC could have drawn within three points.

The Bruins needed Brian Scalabrine to somehow throw away the ball to an unattended Brandon Granville under the basket with 1:01 left. That would have made the score 76-75 in favor of UCLA and left the Bruins totally discombobulated.

And still Scalabrine had two open looks in the last 10 seconds at three-point shots that would have tied the score.

So UCLA escaped total meltdown. So today UCLA can celebrate the big upset.

But can UCLA supporters ignore the way USC threw away the ball, because of a Bruin defense sometimes but other times for no reason whatsoever except that you almost wondered, did the Trojans want to make sure Rick Pitino doesn’t come to Westwood?

When is it not enough to just take responsibility after the fact for how your players didn’t understand “time and score,” didn’t understand the value of “not jacking up threes,” when killing the clock counted? When does a coach have to teach his players something more than how to be very excited and play very hard?

Lavin said that he expected this win to put an end to all of the discussion of Pitino coming to UCLA. The discussion may be over, but it’s over because of the clumsy way Dalis has handled the whole situation. And it’s too bad if the discussion is over.

Because UCLA shouldn’t be happy to upset USC at Pauley Pavilion. Lavin shouldn’t be saying over and over what a big deal it was because, as Lavin kept repeating, “they are a top-20 team.” Whenever Lavin says that, it just reminds us that UCLA isn’t a top-20 team. And it should be.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: [email protected].