Men’s basketball tacks on 4th road loss after falling to Oregon

This post was updated Feb. 24 at 10:06 p.m.

EUGENE — Even a late second-half surge couldn’t help the Bruins get over their road woes.

Despite a 10-0 run in the final frame that gave it the lead with just over five minutes remaining, No. 12 UCLA men’s basketball (20-6, 12-5 Pac-12) couldn’t hold on, falling 68-63 at Oregon (18-10, 11-6) on Thursday night. The loss marked the Bruins’ fourth away defeat in their last five tries despite winning their last seven home games.

“We’re just searching for our rhythm,” said redshirt junior guard Tyger Campbell. “We went on that big run in the second half, (but) we couldn’t weather their storm.”

After junior guard Johnny Juzang injured his right ankle in the first half, UCLA entered the halftime locker room down by five points.

Without Juzang in the lineup for the second frame, Oregon broke off an early 13-5 run, punctuated by a second-chance layup from guard Will Richardson that forced coach Mick Cronin to call a timeout with the Bruins down 13 – their largest deficit of the game.

“It’s just something we’ve been struggling with a little bit this year – just not coming ready to play as we should have,” said junior guard/forward Jaime Jaquez Jr. “It was too late by the time they got up and we tried to make a run back.”

UCLA clawed its way back into the ballgame, with four second-half points from freshman guard/forward Peyton Watson helping put the Bruins down five at the under-eight media timeout. A pair of free throws from Jaquez made it a three-point game, and a transition layup from Campbell cut it to one.

On an ensuing possession, Jaquez collected his own missed shot with no one between him and the basket, leading to an easy two points that gave UCLA its first lead since early in the first half. The uncontested layup gave the blue and gold its 10th unanswered point.

However, the advantage would be short lived. On the very next possession, the left-handed Richardson was fouled going to his left, giving him two free throws to start a 13-3 run from the Ducks that decided the game.

Cronin – who has yet to beat Oregon in his three-year tenure at UCLA – said the late foul on Richardson sunk the Bruins.

“When you’ve got a team on the run like that, the last thing you want to do is put their best player on the foul line,” Cronin said. “We should be smarter than that. We’re a veteran team, there’s just no excuse for what we did there defensively.”

Without Juzang in the lineup, both Jaquez and redshirt senior forward Cody Riley scored 10 points in the second half to pace the Bruins. Riley – who came off the bench for the second straight game but started the second half – tied for the team lead in scoring for the night with 12 points.

Cronin said he re-inserted Riley with the starters in the final frame as a way to jumpstart the offense but added that the team went away from its interior scoring after its late run.

“We needed to keep going into Cody and Jaime in the block because of the way we were shooting the ball,” Cronin said. “And we got away from it – that’s why we stopped scoring.”

Even with the second-half spurt, UCLA shot 36.1% from the field in the last 20 minutes, including a 2-of-18 mark from beyond the arc. For the game, the blue and gold shot 4-of-24 from 3-point range, tied for its second-worst mark of the season.

“Nothing was falling for us tonight, and sometimes you have nights like that,” Jaquez said.

With the loss, UCLA now falls to 6-4 in true road games compared to 14-1 at Pauley Pavilion. In games away from Westwood, the Bruins average 69 points – down over seven points from their usual scoring average.

Campbell said the team needs to figure out how to improve its away play with two games left on the road trip and two weeks until the postseason.

“We just have to figure out what we need to do on the road more and just figure it out by the next game,” Campbell said.