LOS ANGELES – Zach LaVine’s long right arm stayed suspended in front of him as the ball left his fingertips. His wrist – dangling at the end of his arm in positively Jordan-esque fashion – seemed to suggest with a swaggering sort of self-assurance that this wide-open, one-dribble, pull-up 3-pointer at the end of regulation would be the cherry on top of one of the gutsiest and most furious comebacks in UCLA history, announcing the long-awaited return to the spotlight of the Bruins’ most athletic freshman since Russell Westbrook.
It clanged off the back iron. LaVine’s left hand joined his right in the air, as if to beg for an explanation.
“I’ve made a lot of game-winners,” LaVine says, a half hour after UCLA’s double-overtime, rollercoaster loss to Oregon is over. He’s dead tired, having played 48 of the game’s 50 minutes, while putting up 18 points, eight boards and five assists (with zero turnovers). He leans against a wall just outside the Pauley Pavilion media room.
Two overtimes followed his miss with four seconds remaining, and David Wear’s buzzer beater on the next possession made most others forget about it entirely. But the shot is all LaVine is thinking about.
“I swear to God, I thought that was in,” he says. “I held my pose and everything.”
In pregame shootaround – shortly after UCLA coach Steve Alford challenged the talented freshman to fill the void left by suspended guard Jordan Adams – LaVine practiced an almost identical pull-up nearly 200 times, he said. For whatever reason, this shot was not meant to drop.
The last month had brought similar luck. In the almost four-week stretch between UCLA’s two matchups with Stanford, LaVine failed to score in double digits. He made just nine shots from the field in that seven-game span, at a 22.5 percent clip. Those who lauded him as a lottery pick after his blazing start quickly abandoned the bandwagon.
LaVine won’t call it a “slump.” He prefers the phrase “stretch of mishaps.” Still, he concedes he was frustrated, reduced to overthinking.
“I feel like I’m supposed to be a shooter,” LaVine said, “so I was staying in the gym shooting 1,000 shots until 12 at night, just wondering, ‘What’s wrong with me, man?’ This had never happened to me before.”
By typical freshman standards, LaVine’s midseason slump was normal – just a young player hitting a wall, dealing with the transition to college. But LaVine’s introduction had been so profoundly abnormal – his high-flying breakaway windmill against Missouri, his absurd 62 percent line from 3 through eight games, his jump-out-of-the-gym athleticism – that his midseason drop-off felt more like a stark plunge back to Earth.
Ron Bollinger has known LaVine since he was a second-grader, schooling kids two years older in one-on-one during lunch periods. Bollinger remembers students crowding around the lanky 8-year-old, eager to watch him make magic. Bollinger, the coach at Bothell High in Washington, told his wife soon after meeting LaVine that he would be the best player he ever coached. Bollinger is still certain of it.
At Bothell, Bollinger put the ball in his best player’s hands often, working him as a point guard and challenging him to create his own shot.
“There’s very few athletes that have what Zach has,” Bollinger says. “You could tell all along.”
It’s this one-of-a-kind talent that had Bollinger pointing fingers at UCLA during LaVine’s recent slump.
“He’s a natural,” Bollinger says. “But you don’t really get to see it right now because of how they’re using him.”
For someone so dynamic with the ball in his hands, LaVine’s usage rate ranks fifth on the team. He’s been used mostly as an off-guard, cutting, running off screens, catching and shooting.
With only a few shots per game, getting into a rhythm can be difficult. It’s part of the reason, Bollinger believes, that LaVine had midseason struggles in the first place.
On Thursday night, with LaVine spelling a tired Bryce Alford at point guard in the second half, it was hard to deny Bollinger’s point. In his brief new role, the 6-foot-5 LaVine moved with ease, showcasing that briefly bygone swagger with the ball. He was more assertive, darting through openings in the paint and crashing the rim.
“If they allow him to go out there and be a natural, you can just see it in him,” Bollinger says. “It’s in there, just waiting to come out.”
In flashes, it has over the past two games; LaVine has 32 points in that stretch. But not by shooting his way out of it. The answer, LaVine says, was actually shooting less.
With his father, Paul, in town recently, LaVine took a break from his late-night shooting sessions and agonizing over his struggling jumper, opting for one-on-one games of 21 with Dad and late-night movies. The freshman phenom finally took a breath and relaxed, letting all the outside noise fade away.
Now, he says, he’s more in the moment, focused entirely on UCLA’s stretch run. There’s no talk of his draft stock these days – he’s still considered by most to be a mid-first-rounder – and perhaps that’s a weight lifted off already-burdened shoulders.
“Mock drafts, there’s so many of them,” LaVine says. “They’re all saying a different thing – he’s ready, he’s not ready.”
LaVine says he hasn’t made that decision for himself yet. But with his slump behind him, March and the opportunity to erase any lingering doubt beckon.
“Some people may have their doubts about me,” LaVine says. “But I feel like there’s no shot too hard for me to take.”
