Last weekend was not Mick Cronin’s definition of fun.
The fifth-year coach – who spells “fun” as W-I-N – witnessed his team lose its six-game winning streak at the hands of a last-second shot from Utah.
It was the Bruins’ first loss in nearly a month, and Cronin characterized the effort as “disappointing.”
Junior guard Lazar Stefanovic admitted to the precarity of the situation after the game.
“We know the position we’re in – win every game that’s left,” Stefanovic said. “So it does hurt.”
While Saturday’s crosstown matchup against second-to-last place USC won’t help UCLA men’s basketball notch its first Quad 1 win of the season, it will still present a must-win situation that transcends bragging rights to the city. A Bruin bid to the big dance is dwindling in likelihood with each loss, so they will need to triumph against the Trojans to keep their NCAA Tournament hopes afloat.
After splitting the weekend homestand against Colorado and Utah, UCLA now sits at No. 107 in the NET rankings heading into Saturday’s game. The standing is a far cry from the Bruins’ season-worst No. 209 ranking after their 46-point beatdown to the Utes on the road.
Since then, UCLA has won eight of its past 10 matchups, and Cronin marked the game against then-No. 12 Arizona on Jan. 20 as the turning point in his young team’s season.
At McKale Center, the Bruins held a 19-point lead during the first half and a nine-point differential at halftime before letting the advantage slip away.
“Early on, the guys didn’t understand our culture of, ‘It’s not OK to lose,’” Cronin said. “Regardless of your situation, new guys, the whole thing we’ve gone through this year, it’s still not okay to lose. So it took us a while to get back to normal, the way we do things here. I think we got to that at Arizona.”
But Cronin said the team’s winning stretch didn’t necessarily show promise on the defensive end. When the Bruins lost eight games in a nine-game swing earlier this season, they still maintained the top-ranked scoring defense in the conference.
Cronin said that priority has fallen by the wayside, despite his program finding the win column more often.
“I’ve seen a slippage in our defense, and I saw it against Colorado when we had a 14-point lead, we gave up back-door layups,” Cronin said. “In our winning streak, we’ve been giving up 48% from the field. We’ve been forcing a lot of turnovers and getting a lot of offensive rebounds which can make up for that, but that’s way too high of a number.”
But the home Utah game also represented a return to bad habits.
Forward/center Adem Bona was limited to 18 minutes, recording his lowest since a November nonconference game against UC Riverside and matching his minute total in the defeat at Utah. On Sunday, the sophomore picked up his fourth foul with just under eight minutes remaining – a sizable stretch for UCLA to be without its offensive anchor in a game decided in the final six seconds.
Bona said Thursday that learning how to defend without fouling has been a constant area of improvement for him as he grows in his sophomore campaign.
“That’s an aspect I’ve been working on a lot,” Bona said. “We’ve just been watching film with the coaches, trying to figure out what I’ve been doing wrong, what the refs have been calling on me. Just trying to watch, learn from my mistakes and correct them.”
In recent years, late February has presented an opportunity for UCLA to bolster its resume ahead of seeding for the Pac-12 and NCAA tournaments.
But this season, with winning out marking just the first step in the path toward a potential March Madness bid, the circumstances for Cronin’s crew are quite different.
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