Forget Sunday Bloody Sunday: Saturdays have become the day of reckoning for the UCLA men’s basketball team this season.
The Bruins have followed convincing Thursday performances in recent weeks with lackadaisical Saturday efforts, the back ends of two-game spurts leaving UCLA unsatisfied and embarrassed.
A Thursday win over Arizona State? A Saturday loss to Arizona.
A Wednesday win at Cal? A Saturday loss at Stanford.
And then there was the debacle of last weekend’s 67-46 loss to USC, quite clearly the low point in a season of ups and downs.
That all ended Saturday, as UCLA followed a buzzer-beater win over Washington on Thursday with a 74-62 win against Washington State at Pauley Pavilion.
The Bruins controlled the game from the opening tip – the Cougars never took the lead – and led by as many 15 points in winning on Saturday for the first time this season, after five losses.
“I can definitely tell you it wasn’t the partying – we don’t go out the night before games,” said freshman forward Reeves Nelson, who led UCLA with 19 points in 25 minutes. “Just today, we kind of drew the line and said we need to stop taking teams lightly – the lesser of the two teams in the public’s eye – lightly. Before we ran out, we got in our little huddle and I said, ‘We need to just not take no for answer, play our best, play our hardest.’
“In a little more colorful language, but they got the message.”
The Bruins sent the message to Washington State early, but Reggie Moore must not have gotten the memo.
Moore was the only thing keeping the Cougars afloat as UCLA (9-10, 4-3) clamped down the post with a 2-3 zone for nearly the entire game. The Bruins forced Washington State into a season-high 28 3-point attempts, and the Cougars (14-6, 4-4) only converted 10, with Moore hitting 6-of-10.
UCLA held Washington State star guard Klay Thompson – who came into the game as the nation’s third-leading scorer at 22.8 points per game – to just 13 points on 5-of-17 shooting, including just 2-of-9 from 3-point range.
“We’ll still play some man-to-man, but we’re going to have to play zone defense based on what we did this weekend,” UCLA head coach Ben Howland said. “The last two games, (we played zone) the whole time. Even against Arizona State and Cal, primarily. What it does is helps our guys be able to stay in and play more minutes.”
Using just a seven-man primary rotation for the second straight game, the Bruins’ commitment to the zone kept legs fresh and minds sharp.
The difference was most notable for Nelson and senior forward Nikola Dragovic, who combined for 31 second-half points, after just six in the first. Dragovic exploded in the second half for 16 points, hitting 3-of-4 3-pointers including a dagger with just under four minutes left that gave UCLA a 14-point lead.
Dragovic and Nelson picked up where guards Malcolm Lee and Mustafa Abdul-Hamid left off.
Abdul-Hamid had eight points in the first half including a pair of threes and Lee had seven as Washington State clogged the post defensively.
It was in stark contrast to a week ago, when the Bruins were overmatched, outhustled and downright embarrassed by the visiting Trojans.
“We’re not good enough to not bring our A-game every game,” said Abdul-Hamid, two days after hitting a buzzer-beater to beat Washington. “It’s something we should’ve learned the very first game of the season, should’ve learned in the exhibition game, should’ve learned in Portland. If we’re going to be out here and we’re going to win, we have to bring it.”