All season long, UCLA men’s basketball coach Ben Howland has fended off questions about the Pac-10 tournament, about the conference standings, about the future.

Coach-speak be damned, he has stuck his chest out, his chin up and repeated, time in and time out, that his Bruins were still in this thing.

Reporters scoffed, fans shrugged, even the players at times didn’t seem to believe.
Now they do.

With Thursday’s 77-73 win over Stanford and losses by Arizona and Cal, UCLA is now tied with four teams for first place in the Pac-10 standings at 6-4.
A late-season push with four road games – at Washington/Washington State and at Arizona/Arizona State – could leave the Bruins in prime position come Pac-10 tournament time.
Who woulda thought?

Well, UCLA, for one, which is not caught by surpised by the recent ascension.

“Not really, because we as a conference have underperformed,” junior guard Mustafa Abdul-Hamid said. “There’s some great players in the Pac-10. You look at Washington’s Isaiah Thomas and Quincy Pondexter, Landry (Fields) tonight and (Jeremy) Green tonight, we’ve got great players, a lot of future pros. But as teams, the Pac-10 has underperformed. It really doesn’t surprise me. We knew this was how it was going into it. That’s what we did, we set our goal as whatever it takes, whatever that record is going to be, to be first, to get good positioning going into the Pac-10 tournament.”

While the Bruins are far from perfect and know they are – particularly after a loss at Oregon last Thursday – they are quick to point out that what they are now is not what they were and not even what they will be.

“Our overall record is a lot different from how we’re playing right now,” said senior guard Michael Roll, who now has as half as many losses this season (11) as in his first four seasons combined (22), including his injury-shortened redshirt season. “Our non-conference schedule was really tough, our team was a lot different than it is now, and we’ve come together.”

Tyler Honeycutt has made the world of difference, as he continues to get healthier and more comfortable after missing the first six games of the season with a stress reaction in his shin. Honeycutt had 12 points, 11 rebounds and eight assists in the Bruins win over Stanford, his best performance this year.

But Honeycutt isn’t the only reason for UCLA’s upswing.
It took a downswing first.

The players point back to that dreadful 67-46 loss to USC on Jan. 16 as the turning point, the day that they finally said enough.

The Bruins are 4-1 since.
“I can’t say that it was any one thing, but us being together, we were so tired of it,” Roll said. “We got our tails whooped. We hated that feeling.”