Bruins, Heels seek reversal of fortune By Jason King, Yahoo! Sports
Nov 8, 10:37 pm EST
Eight months after UCLA finished 14-18 and failed to make the NCAA tournament, Bruins coach Ben Howland still feels the sting of 2009-10 season.
“Painful,” Howland said Monday. “Very painful.”
North Carolina’s Roy Williams can sympathize. The Tar Heels settled for the NIT last spring despite winning the national title one year earlier. The slide marked the first time in 22 years that a Williams-coached team hadn’t been in the Big Dance.
Williams said he tried all spring and summer to move on. But even now, he can’t.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to put it out of my mind,” Williams said. “A lot of my friends said, ‘Hey, [last season] will make you a better coach. I told them I’d rather stay the bad coach that I was before.”
It truly was a unique situation: Williams and Howland – two of college basketball’s elite coaches – struggling to stay afloat at programs they’d molded into Final Four mainstays during the latter half of the decade.
UCLA went to three consecutive Final Fours under Howland from 2006 to 2008. North Carolina has been three times since 2005 under Williams, who also guided Kansas to four Final Fours before taking over in Chapel Hill.
As the college basketball season begins this week, one of the more intriguing plots will be whether Williams and Howland can help their teams bounce back from their dreadful 2009-10 campaigns.
There are plenty of folks who believe they will. North Carolina is ranked No. 8 in the Associated Press’ preseason poll. UCLA is unranked, but various media outlets have picked the Bruins to finish anywhere from first to third in the Pac-10.
“Hopefully everyone had fun getting their shots in last year,” one Pac-10 coach said of UCLA and North Carolina. “Those schools won’t be down for long. Not with those coaches.”
Indeed, any preseason hype surrounding the Tar Heels and Bruins probably has a lot to do with the men on the sideline. Williams is already in the Hall of Fame, and no one would be surprised if Howland – who is regarded as one of the game’s top tacticians – is inducted someday, too.
Especially if he avoids woeful seasons such as the one that began around this time last year, when UCLA nearly lost an exhibition game against Concordia before falling to Cal State Fullerton in the season opener. Within a month Howland’s squad was toting a 2-6 record that included a 27-point setback to Portland as well as a defeat to Long Beach State.
“It was definitely difficult,” Howland said. “The previous four years we had had a really nice run. It was hard for the players, hard for the coaches, very difficult for the fans.
“Luckily, the people here have been great to me. They’ve been very understanding.”
Disappointed as UCLA fans and administrators may have been, it wasn’t tough to tell that most of what happened last season wasn’t Howland’s fault. The Bruins lost four underclassmen to the NBA draft in 2008 and 2009. The departure of Kevin Love after his freshman season was hardly a surprise, but Russell Westbrook developed more quickly than expected, and Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Jrue Holiday caught Howland a bit off-guard when they declared early.
All of it resulted in a young team that featured three freshmen among its top five players last season. Howland is hoping sophomores Tyler Honeycutt, Malcolm Lee and Reves Nelson will benefit from the adversity they faced during their first year of college.
“When Jordan Farmar and those other guys were playing as freshmen, they had older guys to help carry the load,” Howland said. “Our [freshmen] didn’t have that last year. They had some hiccups, but they never quit. They never stopped working hard.
“Hopefully what happened made them hungry.”
UCLA has abandoned the zone it played last season and has switched back to Howland’s trademark man-to-man scheme. The Bruins are still adapting to the new defense – they shot 64 percent against one another in a recent scrimmage – but Howland’s emphasis on a high-speed, transition offense could pay dividends in a hurry.
“I wouldn’t say it’s night and day from last year,” Nelson said. “But it’s close.”
The biggest difference in this year’s UCLA team will be three new additions to the roster. Freshman Tyler Lamb is a 3-point specialist who became a member of UCLA’s rotation the moment he signed his national letter of intent. Lamb, Lee, Honeycutt and junior college transfer Lazeric Jones will give UCLA a completely different look on the perimeter. Howland said this year’s guards are longer and more athletic and will be able to pressure more defensively.
Jones is competing with Jerime Anderson for the starting job at point guard, which was a weakness for UCLA last season following the unexpected departure of Holiday for the 2009 draft.
“Typically high major programs with good academics don’t take a lot of junior college guys,” Howland said. “But this situation called for it. That position is so critical, and this will open things up so much more for us offensively.”
The biggest difference for the Bruins – literally – will be center Josh Smith, who is listed at 305 pounds on UCLA’s roster. Howland said Smith is in tremendous shape compared to when he arrived on campus in June. His strength and versatility will make him one of the Pac-10’s top post players a freshman.
“He’s been really good,” Howland said. “Not only his dedication as far as working out, but also changing some lifestyle things. He’s a lot more focused on eating a lot better and healthier. That’s got to be a key for him.
“For him to be able to play up to his potential he’s going to have to be able to change ends and get up and down the floor.”
While UCLA may be a year or two away from its next Final Four run, North Carolina has the talent to get there this season thanks to the arrival of Harrison Barnes, the first freshman in history to be named preseason first-team All-American.
The Tar Heels could’ve used a player such as Barnes a year ago, when injuries decimated a team that, for a time, appeared confident and cohesive enough to beat just about any school in the country. North Carolina was 11-3 on New Year’s Day with a victory over Michigan State on its resume. Its only losses were against Top 25 teams Syracuse, Kentucky and Texas.
But then the injury bug bit.
Starters Will Graves and Marcus Ginyard missed time in early January before forward Tyler Zeller went out with a stress fracture that caused him to miss 10 games. With Zeller out the Tar Heels went just 2-8. And they were just 3-5 over the final eight games of the regular season without top overall player Ed Davis.
In all, Williams said eight of his players missed a combined 48 games.
“It sounds like an alibi,” he said. “It sounds like an excuse. But it’s one of the main reasons [we struggled].”
North Carolina’s 17 losses were the most of Williams’ career. Even though the chemistry wasn’t what it needed to be, Williams said he’s finished second-guessing himself about how he handled his team.
“If I had to do it over again, I would do almost everything exactly like we did,” he said. “I was not displeased with what we attempted to do. I just didn’t get our guys to do it well enough.”
Williams is hopeful that will change this season. Davis left after his sophomore year for the NBA. Ginyard graduated, Graves was kicked off the team and Travis and David Wear transferred to UCLA. Still, even with all of the departures, the 2010-11 Tar Heels will be much more talented than the previous outfit.
Much of that is because of the arrival of Barnes, a wing from Ames, Iowa who has left Williams awestruck during the first month of practice. Williams said last month that Barnes prepares harder and has even more intensity than former North Carolina standout Tyler Hansbrough. The example he sets has had an effect on the entire locker room.
“I’ve never been around a freshman that has this kind of intensity at this stage of his freshman year,” Williams said. “All three of the freshmen are mature. They’ve got a different feel about them than most freshmen do.”
Along with Barnes, Williams was referring to shooting guard Reggie Bullock and point guard Kendall Marshall. Bullock is an athletic scorer who will give the Tar Heels the 3-point threat they sorely lacked last season. Marshall will battle Larry Drew and Dexter Strickland for minutes at point guard.
Williams said the freshmen – along with the rest of North Carolina’s players – responded well to a rigorous offseason.
“I pushed them a lot harder,” Williams said. “Our conditioning was not very pleasant. A couple of guys said. ‘Oh, you’re going old school.’ A few guys said it was the hardest thing they’ve ever done.”
If North Carolina has one weakness it may be in the frontcourt. Zeller will be one of the top players in the league and John Henson is poised for a breakthrough season after coming on late as a freshman. But other than Alabama transfer Justin Knox, the Tar Heels lack depth because of the decision of the Wear twins to transfer.
Still, Williams is hoping his team’s ability to put the ball in the basket will make up for its deficiencies down low.
“Coaches love to talk about diving on the floor and drawing charges,” Williams said. “But that thing that hangs from the ceiling … is a scoreboard. And last year we couldn’t score. I think we’ll be able to score a lot more easily this year.”
It may not be enough to stop No. 1-ranked Duke, but hopefully the improved offense and renewed enthusiasm will be enough to erase the bitter memories that continue to linger from last season.
“I’m hopeful it made the players as hungry as it made me,” Williams said. “I’m hopeful it gave them the strength and stamina in the offseason to do more than they would have done I the past.
“I did not enjoy the offseason, and I hope they felt the same way about it.”
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