Men’s basketball transforms into serious candidate for NCAA Tournament By ELI SMUKLER
The Daily Bruin
Published February 8, 2011 in Men's Basketball, Sports
Updated: February 8, 2011, 12:19 AM
How much have you changed since November?
You’ve got one more quarter under your belt, sure. Maybe you got a job or started a new relationship. But how much have you really changed?
For the UCLA men’s basketball team (16-7, 7-3 Pac-10), the result of the two and a half months since Thanksgiving might as well be a metamorphosis.
We’ll start first with the butterfly.
From where they sit now, the Bruins are closer to their goals than they have been at any point this season.
Having won six of its last seven Pac-10 games, UCLA sits squarely in second place in the conference. A surprising three-game losing streak by conference favorite Washington didn’t hurt that placement either.
“It’s really anybody’s game,” freshman center Joshua Smith said after the Bruins posted their third straight win last week. “This is really an important stretch where teams need to play well, and we’re on a good roll right now.”
Add on UCLA’s nonleague victories over St. John’s and Brigham Young, and that puts the Bruins’ NCAA Tournament hopes in a pretty good spot going into this last stretch.
But hold the parade a second. How can this be the same team we saw go winless at Madison Square Garden during Feast Week?
“We’re much better than we were when we were in New York,” coach Ben Howland said after his team’s latest victory. “We’ve improved dramatically from where we were as a team in November.”
No one proves this more than Smith, the biggest caterpillar of the bunch.
In UCLA’s loss to Virginia Commonwealth on Nov. 26, Smith played just 13 minutes because of foul trouble and only scored a single basket. After the game, he looked dejected.
“I feel like since my season started here that I haven’t played a complete game,” Smith said at the time.
It was true. Smith had not played more than 20 minutes in any of the Bruins’ first five games because he committed too many fouls. The freshman phenom was expected to make his presence felt right away on a UCLA team that desperately needed another low-post scorer.
Defensively, he was always a step – one giant step – behind his opponent, and on offense he was tentative around the basket despite being so much bigger than the players guarding him.
Howland was straightforward in criticizing his team.
“We have guys who still don’t know exactly what to do, where to go, because it’s all new,” he said after the loss to Virginia Commonwealth. “We’re dependent on a lot of young, new players that are playing major minutes.”
Somehow over the last few months, depending on those guys has become a good thing.
Flash forward to Saturday to see a more jubilant Smith sitting at the postgame press conference table.
Against St. John’s, he tied his career high with 19 points on eight-of-10 shooting and averaged 28 minutes in the week’s two games.
Smith joked about looking forward to the extra day of rest Howland had granted his players.
“It’s going to be really special,” he said.
Howland is the first to recognize his young center’s improvement.
“This is three games in a row now where you can see he’s no longer a freshman,” Howland said. “He’s really growing as a player and is an unbelievable force down there at both ends.”
Of course, just one metamorphosis won’t do.
UCLA’s stock is definitely on the rise, but this plateau won’t satisfy anyone – not Bruin fans, not the players and most certainly not Howland.
Last week, the Bruins surpassed their win total from the 2009-2010 season – or the year that must not be named – but improvement beyond that performance was expected.
There’s a maxim in college basketball that no one is still a freshman in February.
So starting now, the Bruins won’t be held to the standards of a “young team,” but rather the standards of any other UCLA squad, which get quite steep if you know the program’s history.
The real test of the Bruins’ season will be if they can go beyond the natural course of things. Everyone hits a growth spurt at some point, but it’s the select few who manage to become truly precocious.
Smukler co-hosts “Overtime with Daily Bruin Sports,” which airs every Monday at 6:30 p.m. on UCLAradio.com. E-mail Smukler at esmukler@media.ucla.edu.
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