That last shot at regulation was FLAT.

Speaking of our offense, it feels like watching football. We couldn’t get good looks let alone points, and seemed like we just hope to run the clock down and get a stop on the other end. 1 FG in 13 mins is unacceptable

When Shipp, Roll, and Drag are in the game together, it is a bad fit because they cannot create for themselves. Since we have no inside offensive threat, the other team only needs to play tough on the perimeter, and contain and double Collison when he tries to drive. CBH is alot smarter than me, so I know he’ll get this worked out. I am just disillusioned because Lee, Anderson, Gordon, and Holiday while young and prone to mistakes, bring a fire and enthusiasm which needs to be used. I am not saying they should of been in at the end of the game, but surely with 10 minutes left they could have gotten a good 2-3 minute run of time where the other guys could have gotten a rest and ready for the last frew minutes. Those guys are all greyhounds and they need to be used more often in games like this. We are going to need them in the tourney, and they need to get this experience. After all, it was CBH who said just yesterday that they strength of this team is its depth. Well, we didn’t show it today.

It’s pretty clear the team goes as far as Collison takes them. Collison’s worst game this season as he really slowed down the offense and the team took terrible shots and didn’t play very good defense on Harden. Give Harden credit, he came to play. ASU could not afford to lose both games in LA. Holiday was nonexistent on both ends today. A weak foul call tied up the game, but UCLA’s offensive plays were just dreadful. Very little off the ball movement. Nobody flashed to the free-throw line. No back screens. UCLA was extremely tentative. They’ve got to stop the bleeding at 1 game.

This is the same team with the same guys playing the same way they always play and the same coach and the same everything. It just didn’t happen for us this time. It is not the end of the world. We are still a good team. This is not a fun day, but it will be fun again I’m sure.

Let’s not get overly critical of our guys. Let’s move on and have fun next weekend.

Nope, not me. I have faith in CBH……in fact, I am sur he took it alot harder than me. As for me, I think I am going to take in a movie tonight to make me feel better. I think I’ll go take my kids to see Marley & Me, that should make me feel alot better. CYA

Now the team has to go on the road and play another very methodical team in WSU and then the run and gun UW. The team will need to respond quickly. Any reason Malcolm Lee didn’t play?

We will bounce back from this, but it WAS one of the more frustrating games to watch in my many years of watching this team. There seemed, on the part of both players and coaches, an inability to see that passing it around the perimeter until the last second was not going to get it done. It was like they had no offensive plays in the book.

Can someone explain why there was a foul called on Shipp near the end of regulation? Harden wasn’t slowed down and Shipp didn’t gain any advantage. I just don’t see where there was a foul.

Let’s be frank. Second half Harden came to play. Although our defense on him could’ve been better it wasn’t bad. He still had to work pretty hard on getting his points. Our defense did not let us down. It comes down to clock management and conservative offense. Is it just me, or did anyone notice that there were numerous times in the second half that DC or JH had driven deep into the lane, most often down the middle, and would come to a complete jump stop and kick out the ball to the perimeter. Why not take a a step or two more to go hard to the rim and possibly draw a foul. Speaking from a mental standpoint, it shows we’re timid and give the opposing defense too much confidence. Why did we wait until there was 10 seconds left on the shot clock to begin penetrating and then throw up a desperation jump shot? I can’t stand Kellogg, but he was calling it out the entire second half.

I rewatched it on Tivo and still didn’t see where Shipp was trying to get an advantage. Maybe on the reach-in… but even that was very minimal contact.

Well… if Holiday was trying to impress NBA personnel, this certainly wasn’t the game for him. Jrue played like a freshman today.

At least against WSU they won’t see a zone, but I’m sure UW is taking notes on how they want to defend them.

Arizona State is a top 15 and probably soon to be top 10 team, and we stayed neck and neck (even taking a double-digit in the second half) throughout the game. We may have looked god-awful offensively, but we were going up against a fantastic zone defense, a superb player, athlete, and competitor, and the refs, and considering all of that, we were still able to send it to OT and have chances to take the lead and win the game. We should be happy that our defense pulled through multiple times and kept this game close when we didn’t score a field goal for 12 minutes.

Having said that, that 12-minute stretch without a field goal had to be the worst offensive performance I’ve ever seen in a long, long time. Two things contributed to this, and one of them was NOT CBH’s offensive philosophy and coaching:

1. Arizona State’s defense + UCLA not being great against quality zones. I think we were being a bit overconfident in UCLA’s ability to beat the zone. The teams whose zones we were picking apart are teams who do not specialize in zone defense, so we should have been expected to play well against them with the shooters we have. Arizona State plays all zone, all the time, and similar to Michigan, we just didn’t know how to beat it.

1. Depth. This one kind of puzzles me, and while I am no position to be questioning CBH’s coaching decisions, I can’t help but wonder why he stuck with the same 5 or 6 players throughout the game, and more importantly those last 10 minutes of regulation and OT. Our players are well-conditioned and can play for long stretches of time without getting tired, and we’ve seen that in action many times. This game, it was plainly obvious our key players, DC in particular, were just gassed out, and that was a main reason why we were so stagnant and unaggressive on offense.

I agree with muircoach above that having Roll, Drag, and Shipp in the game is not a good combo. The fact of the matter is that all three are primarily shooters and do not have the athleticism nor the talent to break down and drive by a zone defense. DC was the only one out there who had the capability to break down the defense, and because of how tired he was, he wasn’t able to do so. I think we needed a larger rotation to get DC and the rest of the starters rest, and I would say ML and JA in particular could have helped tremendously in getting starters rest and giving us the ability to break down the zone.

The refs definitely contributed to the loss, but they did not account for our nonexistent offense and inability to put the game away. Our defense played well enough to keep us in the game, but our offensive struggles outdid any superb defense we may have played. This is a learning experience for the team, but it’s a long season, and let’s hope the Bruins will come back strong from this tough loss.

when we went into slow down mode. say what you want about the asu zone, we walked right into it. they guys stopped penetrating and making the diagonal passes to shred the zone and became content swinging the ball around for nearly 30 seconds and launching up 3’s. i understand the theory of burning clock with a lead but it was kinda ridic. in the end, it’s just one game and i hope it’s a learning experience for the team. asu is a good team but we gave this one away more than anything else

and we were not able to match their intensity right off the bat. We expended a lot of energy coming from behind and ended up running out of gas in the second half. The team still has a lot of work ahead of them, and I am sure it is going to be an intense week of practices for them. My only concern is this was a nationally televised game, and for a lot of east coast people, this was their first and only glimpse of our team. Not being able to score a basket for as long as it was, I hope it doesn’t hurt us in March with the seeding.

in the second half did us in. but you can’t expect to go to the line if you are not going strong to the basket. and we didn’t do that. in that win over UofA the other night, as great as it was, I thought to myself we were taking a lot of jump shots…. and I was stoked to see them falling. But we were also moving better, or maybe ASU’s D was just better today, I don’t know. When the shots aren’t falling though someone needs to step up and go strong to somehow get to the line. We have too athletic and talented a group to settle for dribbling the ball and launching something up as the shot clock winds down. That said, I’m still pleased where we are at. I think we are pretty much on par with where ASU is at, and a step below that top tier of teams in the top 10 or so.

I love CBH, and I love my Bruins. However, I hope he rethinks his strategy for games like this one against zones with the lead. I was at this game, and as I have seen him do in countless WINS CBH takes the air out of the balls and works the 35 second clock. The obvious reason for this is that the few possessions for each side, the fewer chances there are for a team that is behind to catch up. In this case, however, we needed the entire 35 second clock to move the zone around to get open shots. If you look at the tape, I think you will see that the Bruins shredded the Wildcats zone from the 8 minute mark of the first half to the 9 minute mark of the second. By holding the ball until 12 seconds were left, our boys had nothing but closely guarded shots, or prayers from the 8 minute mark in. CBH is a genius, and I hope he realizes this error and corrects it for the second game against these guys and against those who play zones. The boys actually played very well against the zone today, until CBH made it nearly impossible. If only we could have put KL, and Luc into the game (they were courtside.)

CBH is the best there ever was at coaching defense. His defense is so superior to everyone else, that it alone wins 90% of the time. Perhaps, to produce the defense he does requires total tunnel vision focus. The trade off is his offensive blind spot.. It’s always there, but it rarely bites us. It bit us today. Not just ten minutes without a field goal, but ten minutes without producing a good look and never any adjustment. The defense may produce another 14 wins out of the next 17 games, but it is a concern that we are 0-3 against quality opponents.

During the time the team wasn’t scoring, it appeared to me that they were trying to milk the clock a bit. 8 minutes to go is too early for that tactic.
ASU extended their zone, contesting the outside shots that had been open in the first half. When that happened, we needed some sharp cuts to the basket. DC wasn’t hitting his shots, those sweet little floaters he usually makes. Someone else needed to step up on the inside.
ASU made some adjustments, and the Bruins didn’t respond. CBH will have some thinking to do, and I’m sure that he will make some changes in the offense.

Howland himself said this team isn’t as good as last years. Our three losses have been close ones to good teams. Perhaps one less cupcake on the pre-conference schedule could help prepare for the ASUs out there, but maybe not. And maybe Howland rides his starters too hard in close Saturday conference games. But these are mere quibbles.

I still say this is a golden age of UCLA basketball, and I’m loving it, the occasional losses notwithstanding. Cheer up, people.

coaches also learn from their mistakes. cbh has been exceptional at this during his tenure so i am confident by season’s end (actually much earlier) we’ll be shooting on all cylinders. maybe this is what needed to happen for coach to realize that a deeper rotation is not just a luxury, but a necessity. if this is what it takes for coach to trust the freshmen with more playing time, then so be it

Yes I felt bad because the way we lost. We seem to be all experts after the game. If DC made the last shot before the regulation time, that would have made Coach Howland a genius, isn’t it? Anyway, I feel I rather lost now so we can learn from the experience, both for the coaches and the players, to prepare for the future games. I thought North Carolina cannot be beaten, but they lost twice. Both Pittsburg and California lost as we did the same day. We should just focus on Pac-10 title and then worry about NCAA championship later. I have good feeling about this team. They are not as good as last year’s team, but they have more potential to improve. Take one game at a time!