Oregon pulls a fast one on Bruins

  Jeff Agase Agase swears he once hit 18
three-pointers with Isaiah Thomas on NBA Jam. E-mail him at
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Look left. Look right. Does it hurt to move your eyes? If it
does, you probably suffered ocular strain during Oregon’s
91-62 mile-a-minute blowout of sluggish UCLA.

The Bruin players are probably suffering something similar
““ only they weren’t watching on television, so
they’re probably getting whiplash neck pains instead.

Oregon was faster than UCLA last night. Period.

They set a frantic pace at a frantic McArthur Court from the
tip, and forced the Bruins to try and play (key word being
“try”) at a pace where they simply couldn’t
hang.

“We didn’t give ourselves a chance to win
tonight,” UCLA head coach Steve Lavin said.

Oregon’s track meet style had everything to do with
that.

Every player on the Pac-10’s top offensive team ““
even 7-foot-2 Chris Christofferson ““ had the energy to play
the kind of vertical basketball that has done in most of the
conference’s elite at one time or another.

All of it must have come as an unpleasant surprise to UCLA fans,
who are accustomed to seeing their athletes throw the opposition
off with a frenzied press defense and high-octane transition
offense.

The Bruins looked like those teams last night. They didn’t
have enough time to press, even after the rare occasions when they
were able to score. Had they tried, Oregon’s sparkplug point
guard Luke Ridnour would already be in their paint, either driving
for an uncontested layup or kicking the ball out for one of 10 Duck
three-pointers.

Of course, it didn’t help that the Bruins could
practically smell the breath of the boisterous Oregon faithful. But
that’s what the road is like in conference. Just as many
Bruins said earlier this week, you can’t let the opposing
team and crowd dictate how you play.

And to the Bruins’ credit, they tried, at least early on,
to set up their halfcourt offense and bring the pace down. Compared
to the Ducks, UCLA looked like the boring Princeton team that beat
them in the 1996 NCAA Tournament.

But the Bruins have scored all year playing like they were in
NBA Jam, not by lulling the opposition to a slumber.

That was when the opposition was substantially slower, though.
Some of the “slow motion” replays of Oregon’s
dunks looked like they were at real-time speed.

Luckily for UCLA, Oregon will show up at most two more times on
the schedule. And although it may be the only team of its kind in
the Pac-10, there are plenty just like it around the nation, teams
they might face come March.

The best thing the Bruins can take from the 29-point drubbing is
the three-minute span when they turned up the intensity, pressed
effectively in the backcourt, and rattled off a 12-0 run.

So it’s not as though the Bruins can’t possibly keep
up. They need to choose to keep up, though. They need to want to
keep up.

The fact that they couldn’t get up for a game against the
conference’s top team in a hostile, big-game environment
might be cause for some serious thinking.

The Ducks came to play. They also came to run. Their fans were
just as quick, delivering the obligatory “Overrated”
chant with a whopping 13:18 to play.

It seemed to come too fast, but it was already time.

They were up by 35.