Ball bounces Bruins’ momentum
By Daily Bruin Staff
Nov. 20, 2001 9:00 p.m.
 The Associated Press Ball State’s Lonnie
Jones, left, gets the bucket on a slam dunk over
Dan Gadzuric in the first half of the game.
Ball State 91 UCLA 73
By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
LAHAINA, Hawaii “”mdash; As the UCLA basketball players filed
into the gymnasium and made their way to their locker room before
their game, they looked over at what was transpiring on the
court.
They glanced up at the scoreboard: Duke by 26 over South
Carolina with less than three minutes remaining.
Things were back to normal. The parameters of possibility had
once again constricted within their regular boundaries. Evidently,
the basketball gods decided that one upset was enough for this
tournament.
How deceptive these delusions can be.
UCLA, which appeared to be in a position it wanted to be going
into halftime Tuesday afternoon against Ball State, was obliterated
by the Cardinals (2-0) in the second half and was up-ended 91-73 in
front of a full house of 2,500 at the Lahaina Civic Center. The
butterfingered Bruins (1-1), ranked third in the country, committed
22 turnovers during the Maui Invitational semifinal and became the
sixth top-10 team to go down this season. They also became the
second top 5 team ““ the other being No. 4 Kansas on Monday
““ to fall to the unranked Cardinals, who will face Duke in
the tournament final.
So much for normalcy.
“We think it’s pretty clear that Ball State beat us
to the punch today,” said UCLA head coach Steve Lavin, who
last faced the Cardinals in the first round of the 2000 NCAA
Tournament in a game he won. “They outplayed us in every
phase of the game.”
Laid to waste were Jason Kapono’s 26 points and T.J.
Cummings’ 15, numbers countered by Ball State guard Patrick
Jackson’s 23 and Theron Smith’s 22.
At the half, UCLA trailed by only four, 44-40. The game appeared
to be in the Bruins’ control. UCLA’s depth, it was
assumed, would determine the outcome over the course of the second
half. Only a day ago, UCLA was in a similar situation against
Houston and emerged from the halftime intermission to blow out the
shallow-benched Cougars, whose legs left them.
But the Cardinals never lost their legs ““ or, should we
say, wings ““ and started the second half with a 23-9 run.
They continued to push the pace and bomb away threes, as UCLA had
trouble keeping up with their speed on the perimeter.
Ball State tallied only three turnovers throughout the entire
game (two in the second half) and hucked up 34 three-point shots in
the contest, making 12 of them. The Cardinals’ shots kept
falling (they made half of their second-half shots), while most of
those taken by the Bruins clanked off the rim. UCLA, which shot
well in the first period, was limited to a 35 percent field goal
percentage in the second half. And because of the number of
turnovers the Bruins committed, they were outshot 81 to 54 in the
game despite holding a 45 to 36 edge in rebounds.
“It was getting hot in there, and we were both
fatigued,” Jackson said. “But we did a good job of
conditioning and wanted to keep running them and keep running
them.”
“We knew coming in it was going to be a tough game,”
UCLA forward Rico Hines said. “It didn’t just dawn on
us in the second half. We knew it was going to be a dogfight from
the beginning.”
UCLA plays tomorrow in the third place game against South
Carolina at 3 p.m. It will be televised on ESPN2.
