Court Visions: With Jordan Adams injured, Bruins face uncertain future
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LAS VEGAS — One of the more appealing sights that comes with watching Jordan Adams play is how much he falls down.
It’s not fun to watch a player constantly making contact with the hardwood, but Adams does it for a simple reason: the more thuds the referees hear, the more trips to the free-throw line Adams gets. The reward for the freshman guard, a great free throw shooter, is greater than the risk that comes with willfully subjecting his body to all of that punishment.
In Friday’s 66-64 win over Arizona, the effectiveness of that strategy was on full display. Adams kept driving to the basket, creating contact and hitting the deck. Each time, a noise of bone on wood echoed inside the MGM Grand Garden Arena. Each time, Adams jumped right back up and calmly stepped to the free-throw line, none the worse for the wear.
Call him deceitful or a flopper, but Adams was getting to the free-throw line while every other Bruin was struggling to score.
In fact, he was the only UCLA player to attempt a free-throw in the first half. He finished with 13 attempts, more than the entire Arizona team, and made 11. Free throws accounted for almost half of his 24 points, a scoring outburst that carried the Bruins to a win after they were trailing by 11.
“He’s probably the best I’ve ever seen at getting contact and getting to the line,” said redshirt junior forward Travis Wear.
That makes what happened at the end of the win that sent UCLA into the Pac-12 Tournament championship game even more cruel. On a routine play, one that made sure UCLA would not lose, Adams’ great freshman season ended. When he landed after rising up to contest Arizona’s attempt at a game-winning shot, Adams broke the fifth metatarsal in his right foot.
This wasn’t one of those times when Adams meant to put himself in danger, but he ended up in more pain than ever. He hobbled off the court while UCLA celebrated, a sad image to end a game where he was the Bruins’ savior.
The Bruins are now down to seven scholarship players for the rest of the season. UCLA will make the NCAA Tournament regardless of what happens in Sunday’s final against Oregon, but now it has only one chance to show the selection committee what kind of team it is without Adams.
When comparing the tapes of UCLA pre- and post-Adams, the committee will see one thing: he is irreplaceable.
The Bruins have lost their second-leading scorer, but they also lost the one player coach Ben Howland trusts to defend the opposition’s best wing.
Sophomore guard Norman Powell likely takes Adams’ spot in the lineup, but the defensive-minded, athletic guard is a completely different player.
Losing that shooter will let defenses key in on senior point guard Larry Drew II and freshman guard/forward Shabazz Muhammad even more now. UCLA will have to look for points inside, something they haven’t been successful at this season.
A number of Adams’ intangible traits also cannot be duplicated: the way he uses his head to fake defenders into thinking he’s shooting, how he shuffles his feet and uses quick hands on defense to make up for average athleticism and his abundance of confidence to rise up for a shot, no matter how many he missed before it.
That penchant for getting those easy free throw attempts is another one of those skills that impresses many of the seniors in the UCLA locker room.
“Jordan got beat up today,” Drew said before hearing the news of Adams’ injury. ”He fell at least four or five times and just jumped right back up. That’s a tough kid. He’s tough as nails man.
He just has that knack. He knows how to use his body. That’s a skill, something that I myself really need to work on. Probably need to go watch some Jordan Adams videos and study his game a little bit. Which I’m pretty sure I will do, because he’s like a master at it.”
When he did hear that Adams’ season had ended, Drew was emotional. He walked back to the locker room with a worried look on his face and tears in his eyes while Howland delivered the news to the team.
Adams, on the other hand, was his usual self.
He iced up his foot and then spoke to the media in the locker room immediately after the game ended. Athletic trainer Laef Morris came over to give him a pair of crutches, but Adams didn’t think anything of the injury and thought he had just twisted his foot.
After getting taken away for X-rays, he returned to the locker room with a walking boot on and a diagnosis, yet he didn’t sport the look of someone who was devastated.
He answered questions about the injury confidently and quickly, as the soft-spoken Atlanta native usually does when talking to the media. He took the news in stride and even found time to smile during the most bittersweet moment imaginable.
“Everything happens for a reason,” said Adams, adding that he had faith in his teammates to carry on without him.
Knowing Adams, this isn’t surprising. Though the news wasn’t of the same magnitude, he learned earlier in the week that the Pac-12 coaches hadn’t named him as one of the conference’s five best freshmen, even though he turned in better performances than either of the two Bruins that did make the list.
Adams, a monotone undeterred by adversity, didn’t change his tune after the snub.
“If he was (mad), he didn’t really express it,” Drew said. “He proved today that he should have been.”
The best game of his short career ended in the worst possible way, but Adams was calm about it. Maybe it is because he suffered the same injury in high school, and bounced back to get to where he is now.
Adams will be alright. The same can’t be said for the Bruins.
Note: Daily Bruin articles get their own blog post here because their formatting really screws things up when you try to combine them with articles from other sources in a single blog post.
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