Hobbled Coach Howland speaks UCLA Basketball

Hobbled Howland working to get UCLA program back on its feet
July 19, 2010
By Gary Parrish
CBSSports.com Senior Writer

Ben Howland continues to have a little trouble walking five weeks after surgery to repair that torn Achilles' tendon, and he keeps the crutches laying around just in case he must turn to them on a bad day. Still, the UCLA coach said this weekend that, all things considered, he actually feels pretty good heading into the second half of the July evaluation period.

"It's not painful," Howland joked. "It's just a pain in the butt."

In other words, the worst from a mid-June surgery now seems behind Howland as he prepares to scoot gingerly around Las Vegas and various other cities hosting sanctioned recruiting events from July 22-31. Thus, the question isn't whether Howland's mobility will soon return to normal as much as it's whether his team will soon return to normal. What happened last season, you might remember, wasn't normal.

UCLA finished 14-18 overall, 8-10 in the Pac-10 after making three of the previous four Final Fours. The subpar effort didn't make the Bruins the nation's biggest disappointment -- that title went to North Carolina with Connecticut, Oklahoma, Michigan and Texas also receiving votes -- but it did make them one of the more surprising stories in college basketball. Howland had spent years developing a reputation that made losing at that (or this) point in his career seem improbable despite an unusual amount of early losses to the NBA Draft. Watching a Howland-coached team A) Struggle to defend in a man-to-man setting; and B) Struggle to win in a below-average Pac-10 was as stunning as watching Tiger Woods spray the ball all over Augusta National, as strange as watching LeBron James, the two-time and reigning NBA Most Valuable Player, opt to be somebody's sidekick in a take-it-or-leave-it sports city like Miami.

None of it makes any sense to me.

And yet it all happened.

And now Howland has to turn around his part of the never-saw-it-coming trifecta with only 10 scholarship players -- and four (Malcolm Lee, Jeremime Anderson, Brendan Lane and Tyler Lamb) are dealing with offseason surgeries.

"An injury-riddled summer is better than an injury-riddled season," Howland said, and you must admit he has a point. "We just need to stay healthy once we get into September."

If so, expect the Bruins to rebound.

That's my official prediction.

No, I don't think they'll make the Final Four for the fourth time in six seasons. But a year-older core of Lee, Reeves, Nelson and Anderson should be enough to make UCLA a factor in the Pac-10, though I would feel better about things if I knew how freshman Josh Smith would perform, or at least knew how much he would weigh for the opener.

"He's had a major conditioning problem," Howland acknowledged.

Smith has long been considered an elite center for his class, and his high school career was capped with a 10-point effort in the McDonald's All-America Game. He's a super-talented kid, just one with the kind of weight problem that could limit how effective he can be and how many minutes he can play.

So where's Smith now?

Howland didn't want to get into specifics about Smith's weight or body fat percentage, saying only what we all already know -- that there has been a conditioning problem -- before opting to focus on the positive. Howland said Smith isn't where he needs to be now, but that he's getting closer, and that he's going to be counted on to contribute immediately.

"I expect him to play a very important role," Howland said. "That's why this summer is so important for him, and he's working his butt off. He's working three times a day. He comes in at 8 a.m. every day and rides the bike or runs on the treadmill for an hour. Then he comes back at 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., too. He's doing good. He's really looking to get into good physical condition."

Assuming that happens, the Bruins will be in good shape. Meanwhile, Howland will be bouncing around the rest of the month trying to gain commitments from Class of 2011 prospects who will join David and Travis Wear (transfers from North Carolina) for the 2011-12 season. Assuming that also happens, the worst will indeed be behind the man who established the Pittsburgh program before rebuilding UCLA's, the worst both in terms of that mid-June surgery and basketball in general.