EDWARD LIN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Point guard
Ryan Walcott loses his footing against Cal. He
committed five of the Bruins’ 19 turnovers.
By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The UCLA men’s basketball team is almost a season older,
now a survivor of numerous crises. The squad has been destroyed and
rebuilt, over and over.
The Bruins went from playing a pressuring defense, which
didn’t work, to playing zone. They went from running set
plays to running a motion offense.
Yet, regardless of the formation they took on the floor, the
Bruins were rarely able to hold onto the basketball when it was in
their hands. UCLA head coach Steve Lavin stressed the importance of
not turning the ball over his team, but it didn’t matter.
The careless passes continued to mount.
Thursday night was no different for the Bruins, who turned the
ball over 19 times in their first-round game of the Pac-10
Tournament against Cal.
Eleven of them came in the first half.
Eight more followed in the second.
All of them hurt. They cost the Bruins the game.
“In the first half, the 11 turnovers we had put us in a
hole,” Lavin said, looking down at the box score during the
postgame press conference.
“We were pretty careless starting out,” junior
forward Jason Kapono added. “We were a little tense. We
wanted to have a good showing. Maybe some of the turnovers were
caused by that.”
So, as has often been this case this season, it’s time to
worry about the Bruins.
This might not be the end of UCLA’s season, but, really,
what can the team do from here on out?
The Bruins’ pair of prized freshmen point guards ““
Cedric Bozeman and Ryan Walcott ““ combined for 11 turnovers.
Sure, one of them, Bozeman, was injured for six weeks, and the
other, Walcott, was buried in the bench until late in the year. But
that’s of little consolation to a squad that intends to make
a run in the NCAA Tournament this season.
In the first three minutes of the game alone, Bozeman had three
turnovers. He was stripped of the ball by Solomon Hughes, a
6-foot-11 center, a minute into the game. He was then called for
carrying over, twice, before being replaced by Walcott. He finished
the game, which happened to fall on his 19th birthday, with six
turnovers in 12 minutes.
Walcott didn’t play error-free ball either, contributing
five turnovers to the Bruins’ total tally. And he may have
made the most costly of them, one with 1:20 to go in the game and
UCLA down 61-59.
Much of the Bruins’ carelessness can be attributed to the
free-flowing motion offense UCLA had to use to combat Cal’s
pair of 6-foot-11 towers, Hughes and Jamal Sampson. But even when
they employed a set offense in their visit to Berkeley on Feb. 21,
they turned the ball over 22 times.
Lavin may have changed his team’s look, but it can hardly
be called progress. And if he can’t find a way to give the
Bruins more than a superficial facelift, their season will be over
soon.