An early exit from the Pac-10 Tournament motivates the No. 7-seeded UCLA men’s basketball team to redeem itself against No. 10 seed Michigan State
Joshua Smith goes for a layup in the Pac-10 Tournament quarterfinals. Smith said he and his teammates will need to bounce back Thursday after their loss to Oregon.
By Brantley Watson
March 14, 2011 11:43 p.m.
You could see from the opening tip that the Bruins were in for a difficult evening.
After their March 10 Pac-10 quarterfinal loss to the Oregon Ducks, you could see it on UCLA coach Ben Howland’s face that he was worried.
If you could not see it on his face, you could count the number of times he used the words “disappointing” and “frustrating” and then be forced to realize his level of anxiety as you were unable to keep count midway through the postgame press conference.
“This was a really disappointing showing coming off of a solid regular-season campaign,” he said.
“It’s disappointing, obviously, for us to lose this way. It’s really, really frustrating,” he added.
It seemed like Howland possessed no other adjectives in his arsenal for a good 15 minutes.
But about halfway through Thursday’s press conference, using the art of the pun to describe his team’s performance, the UCLA coach appeared to have a minor epiphany, that maybe some good could come out of the loss.
“I was really excited about the momentum that we’ve built late in the year coming into the tournament and we really, really laid an egg tonight,” Howland said. “It will be a true test of our character how this team bounces back from this performance tonight.”
There was the epiphany ““ the bounce back.
And from that point on, midway through the postgame press conference until the end of the locker room player interviews, the theme of the night shifted from embarrassing defeat to future redemption.
“This will be something hopefully that we can take and get better from, somehow,” said Howland, his tone having changed dramatically.
Bruin sophomore forward Tyler Honeycutt seemed to undergo a change of opinion about Thursday’s loss around the same time as his coach. Earlier in the press conference, Honeycutt commented that the Bruins came into their game against Oregon with “too cool of an attitude.”
But Honeycutt’s initial disappointment soon transformed into motivation.
“We’re going to take this game as a learning experience,” Honeycutt said. “I think we took it for granted being the No. 2 seed, we thought we were going to get a couple easy games right off the bat.
“(We’ll) remember this game, but in a way, forget about it and move on to the next one.”
What a difference a few minutes can make.
Minutes later, UCLA junior guard Jerime Anderson explained that the silver lining in the Oregon loss could possibly be that the Bruins got their last poor performance of the season out of their system.
“I guess we could see it that way right now,” Anderson said. “That would be a good way to look at it, just because now we can be more prepared and practice. We got this out of the way, now it’s time to get down to business and try to win a game in the tournament.”
The Bruins learned their tournament fate Sunday afternoon, landing a No. 7 seed, which is slightly surprising considering that the buzz after Thursday’s loss was that UCLA would suffer a major drop in seeding, possibly to a No. 10 or No. 11 seed.
But despite the decent seed, the Bruins will face a tough test in No. 10-seeded Michigan State, who entered the season ranked No. 2 in the preseason poll, but endured a difficult season.
“We could look at it (as redemption),” sophomore forward Reeves Nelson said. “I know for sure that we’re going to work really hard in practice the next (week). We just have to learn what we can from this loss and just move on.”
However, UCLA freshman center Joshua Smith was not quite on the same page as his Bruin teammates concerning using the Oregon loss as motivation.
“We shouldn’t really look at it that way,” Smith said. “We never want to have a bad game and use that as motivation. We should use the fact that we want to win the Pac-10 tournament as motivation.”
But what Smith did reiterate is that Thursday’s loss must serve as a learning block for this UCLA team, a team that has not lost consecutive games since early January.
“This is a bad game “¦ and we have to forget about this and get ready for a good week of practice before we leave,” Smith said.
Regardless of opposing viewpoints, one thing that cannot be argued is that the Bruins have their work cut out for them against the Spartans. Despite a 19-14 season, Michigan State holds wins over Washington, Purdue and Wisconsin, all of which are members of this year’s NCAA Tournament field.
But as Howland explained Thursday, the regular season is over. From this point on, teams will be working with a blank slate, which is more than likely exactly what his Bruins need.
