UCLA men’s basketball prepares for challenge in Las Vegas

UCLA men’s basketball’s comfort zone has been clearly established.

In five games over a three-week period to open the season at Pauley Pavilion, the Bruins have averaged 87.2 points per game, good for 27th best in the nation. They’ve done it, however, without playing a single opponent from a conference in the top 10 for bids in the 2013 NCAA Tournament.

Over the next two days, No. 19 UCLA will face its two toughest tests of the young basketball season, if only due to location. After two opening-round games of the 2013 Continental Tire Las Vegas Invitational against Morehead State and Chattanooga in the comfort of their own home, the Bruins will take to the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas Thursday against Nevada and Friday against Northwestern.

While the next two games will help determine UCLA’s status in the early-season tournament, they kick off a span of three neutral or road games in the next two weeks that will help determine whether the team’s early success is the making of something legitimate or just a cloud of smoke. After returning home to play UC Santa Barbara on Tuesday, the Bruins (5-0) take on undefeated Missouri in Columbia, Mo. – the team’s first true hostile environment of the season.

“We’ve been able to play well and hold serve at home, but now with 75 percent of our next four games being away from home, we just see how we perform away from Pauley early in the season,” said coach Steve Alford. “I think that’ll give us a good barometer of where we are after the first week in December.”

The two-game, two-day format also offers something very similar for a UCLA team that will take part in the Pac-12 tournament come March. Aside from the fact that Orleans Arena is a mere five-minute drive from the MGM Grand Garden Arena, this week’s slate of games is the Bruins’ first and only opportunity to replicate a quick recovery time before taking part in Pac-12s to close the regular season.

“We’ve talked about now going to Vegas, we’re going to play back-to-back games,” Alford said. “We don’t do that again until the Pac-12 tournament, so to have that in our pocket, we can come back to it in three months and say, ‘We played back-to-back games.’”

UCLA only got a small taste of that kind of fatigue in playing its first two-games-in-three-nights series this past Friday and Sunday. Especially against very different team styles, quick turnarounds can be difficult to handle, but the Bruins felt they improved from game one to game two.

“I think we did well,” said sophomore guard Jordan Adams. “That’s always tough to do playing that amount of games close together, so we all have to pay attention to detail and scouting reports of the other team. I feel like we handed that well.”

On Thursday, the Bruins face arguably the most prolific scorer they’ve confronted all season in Nevada’s senior guard Deonte Burton, who averages 24.5 points per game.

Limiting the production of Burton and his supporting cast should be made easier, however, thanks to increased depth provided by freshman forward Wanaah Bail, who Alford said is likely to make his debut Thursday after missing UCLA’s first five games with a knee injury.

Having Bail in the lineup would mean a rotation of nine players moving forward, a luxury the Bruins never had last season and something that should lead to fresher legs late in games.

“I think (Las Vegas will) be tougher, but with the team we have, I think it all depends on us,” said sophomore center/forward Tony Parker. “If we play a good 40 minutes, it’ll be really hard to beat us.”