UCLA roller coaster season continues: After Cal win, loses to Stanford, 70-59.

 
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Turnovers are too much for UCLA to overcome

The Bruins turn the ball over 23 times but still hang close before falling to Stanford, 70-59.

By David Wharton
The Los Angeles Times
January 10, 2010

Reporting from Palo Alto - Focus on a particular moment from UCLA's slapstick Saturday afternoon.

An otherwise innocuous pass glances through guard Michael Roll's hands, the ball ricochets off his head and bounces out of bounds.

Now take that pratfall and multiply it by 23.

To say the Bruins let victory slip away would be an understatement, miscues adding up to a 70-59 loss at Stanford that would have been comical were it not so disheartening.

"Twenty-three turnovers are what kills us," Coach Ben Howland said. "That's way too many."

Or, just enough to sink UCLA to 7-9, 2-2 in Pacific 10 Conference play, and leave Howland sounding like the ultimate realist when looking ahead.

"The bottom line is, for us to be in the NCAA tournament, the only chance we have is to win the Pac-10 title in the tournament," Howland said.

Though that's hardly a groundbreaking statement, it underscores the state of an inconsistent team.

Roll, the usually reliable senior who contributed five giveaways, sounded equally frustrated.

"Just bad karma," he said. "I don't know what it was."

Saturday's game in front of 6,946 at Maples Pavilion began on a sunnier note, UCLA coming off an upset victory at California and hoping for a road sweep.

Stanford, hovering at .500 and picked to finish near the bottom of the conference, appeared vulnerable if the Bruins could manage two key issues.

First, they needed patience and outside shooting from Roll and Nikola Dragovic, who have become their offensive punch. Second, they needed to contain forward Landry Fields and guard Jeremy Green -- as those two go, so goes the Cardinal.

But the Bruins started sloppy and hurried, making only 25% of their shots and giving the ball away seven times in the first seven minutes.

They might have been thinking back a week to when they defeated Arizona State, then came out flat against a supposedly weaker Arizona. Maybe this time, after another big win, they were too eager.

"We were kind of amped before the game," center Reeves Nelson said.

But that doesn't explain what happened with Stanford's Green, who quickly sank a pair of jumpers, a harbinger of bad things to come.

As the minutes ticked by, the Bruins could not handle him in man-to-man defense and inexplicably left him untended in the zone.

Sometimes it didn't matter what they did.

"My adrenaline's flowing and I'm just caught up in the game," Green said, adding: "It was a good game."

Good as in 30 points, the highlight coming at the end of the first half as UCLA calmed down and forged a slim lead.

With time running out, Green hit a scrambling three-point bank shot against double coverage to give his team a 34-33 halftime lead.

The desperation shot might have dented UCLA's momentum, but this was still a winnable game.

With a combination of players heating up in the second half, making clutch shots, the Bruins were back to within a point in the final 10 minutes.

That's when the turnovers came back to haunt them.

With a chance to take the lead, an outmanned Lee pressed too hard down the lane and gave the ball up, one of several instances in which young UCLA players lacked the experience to gauge tempo and stay under control.

Instead, Stanford soon pulled away, adding another unexpected win to last week's upset of USC, improving to 8-7, 2-1 in conference.

"The turnovers at the end came because we were just trying to make things happen," said Lee, who ended up with seven.

So it didn't matter that the Bruins shot 55%, led by Dragovic's 13 points. Or that they won the battle on the boards, 30-25.

Those 23 turnovers translated into 25 points, and that was the difference.

"They made big shots off of it, scored every time it seemed like," Roll said. "We just dug ourselves a hole."
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UCLA can't turn over new leaf against Stanford
By Jon Gold, Staff Writer
The Los Angeles Daily News
Updated: 01/09/2010 10:46:53 PM PST

STANFORD - Just as the UCLA men's basketball team appears to be climbing over the mountain this season, the pole slips, the compass goes haywire and the goggles fog up.

The Bruins again sputtered out Saturday at Stanford's Maples Pavilion, following up a last-minute, buzzer-beating win at Cal on Wednesday with a 70-59 loss to the Cardinal in front of 6,946.

Just when they have appeared to be turning the corner this season, the Bruins have found a way to shoot themselves in the foot.

A bigger surprise was they didn't drop the gun.

The Bruins committed 23 turnovers in a flurry of bad ballhandling and worse passing, with Stanford willing to just wait and let UCLA gaffe its way into a loss.

After James Keefe's 3-pointer brought the Bruins within one at 51-50 with 9:16 remaining, UCLA gave the ball away four times in its next seven possessions.

"At the end of the day, 23 turnovers is what kills us," UCLA head coach Ben Howland said. "Just way too many turnovers. We're down 51-50 and we're on a fast break and we turn it over because we're out of control.

"I don't know how many of those 23 errors are forced, but I'd say a lot of them are our mistakes."

When the Bruins weren't killing themselves, it was Jeremy Green's turn.

Stanford's sophomore shooting guard, who missed one game against the Bruins last year and went scoreless in the other, had 30 points on 11-of-18 shooting and hit 5-of-8 3-pointers. His biggest shot was an off-balance, one-legged, desperation 3-point heave from the wing that banked in as the first half expired to put Stanford ahead 34-33.

UCLA seemed to be a step below Green on screens, and even when the Bruins were in his face he shot over them. Green, providing an outside threat to star forward Landry Fields' mid-range game, got off to a scorching start with 17first-half points and never cooled down.

"Shoot, he was hot," UCLA's Malcolm Lee said. "Hey, Green is a terrific player. We knew his background coming in this game - as well as Fields - but he just played outstanding for them. He did have a lot of clean looks, but he also made a few well-contested shots.

"When a guy is going, it's hard to stop that."

UCLA kept pace early by mixing up its scoring despite a dreadful first 15 possessions.

With just more than seven minutes gone by, the Bruins were down 13-5 with seven turnovers, 2-for-8 shooting, hurried shots and poor ball movement. UCLA calmed down a bit and shot 11 for 15 with five turnovers the rest of the way.

The Bruins took their first lead with five minutes left in the first half on a jumper by senior forward Nikola Dragovic, who led the Bruins with 13 points.

In the second half, though, there was no righting the sinking ship.

"Late in the game we're just down and trying to make things happen and it seemed like everybody was on attack mode," said Michael Roll, who had 12 points but also five turnovers. "We had the ball down one and that's just where the turnovers took over.

"We had a bunch down late on the stretch and they capitalized and made big shots, scored every time it seemed like. We just dug ourselves a hole."

In a way, the game was a reflection of the season: A poor start followed by a little run, a chance to break out of a funk and then disappointment.

"This loss is disappointing because it was a winnable game," said freshman forward Reeves Nelson, who had eight points and five rebounds - but four turnovers - before fouling out. "We were the better team.

"But it's really tough to win on the road - I've already found that out in just a few games - and that one guy just couldn't miss. He didn't miss."
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UCLA basketball: Bruins let one slip away at Stanford
By David Wharton
The Los Angeles Times
January 9, 2010 | 5:05 pm

If UCLA is looking to explain its 70-59 loss in a Pacific 10 Conference basketball game at Stanford this afternoon, the Bruins don't have to look far.

Total turnovers:23.

The Bruins had started sloppy but found a rhythm -- for a while, at least -- and trailed by only a point, 34-33, at halftime.

UCLA needed to be careful with the ball and stop Stanford guard Jeremy Green, who had raced to 17 points in the first 20 minutes with remarkable outside shooting, but that was easier said than done.

Green opened the second half with a pair of three-pointers to help stake his team to a six-point lead.

From there, the Bruins made several runs but kept shooting themselves in the foot with miscues as the gap widened.

Green ended up with a career-high 30 points and UCLA ended up with the loss.

Landry Fields finished with 16 points and seven rebounds for the Cardinal (8-7, 2-1 in Pac-10 play), who snapped a six-game losing streak in the series. Jack Trotter added 10 points and Jarrett Mann dished out eight assists.

Nikola Dragovic scored 13 points and Michael Roll had 12 for UCLA, which came into the game averaging 15.3 turnovers.

Tyler Honeycutt grabbed eight rebounds for the Bruins (7-9, 2-2), who held a 30-25 advantage on the boards.