And there are a lot of ways you can look at this game. I’ll briefly respond to your points:

1. Whether or not Arizona State is overrated, they are still in the top 15, still in the top 3 of the Pac-10 (Cal enters the discussion here as well), and they did just give us our first Pac-10 loss of the season. I’d hardly call that a pushover, even if they’re no top team.

2. Harden being unstoppable was definitely an overstatement and I probably should have used a different term (it wasn’t really supposed to be literally interpreted, more to prove that he’s an excellent player). One bad game against a decent team (IIRC, his only truly bad game of the year) hardly makes or breaks a player, and even the best will have a bad game once in a while.

3. Our offense wasn’t truly clicking until the second half, but let’s also consider the context: The game was played at a slow pace throughout, and zone defenses usually require most of a possession to break down and get something going. Considering that and our bad start and how we were only trailing by 2 at halftime (a testament to the slow nature of the game and also our defense), while our offense certainly wasn’t at its best in the first half, it was playing well enough to stay in the game. It certainly helped that JS was on his A-game in the first half too. ;)

4. It was some of both. From re-watching Tele’s last highlight video, when we took our 11-point lead, I saw a lot of offensive execution against the zone: Crisp passing, aggressive penetration (especially from DC), and open shots that were falling through. A lot of it started on the defensive end and we had to get stops to get a lead, but the offense was just as critical, and was certainly “clicking” there.

5. Lack of depth and getting tired, resulting in less aggressiveness, was what forced us into that protect offense, imo. Arizona State’s zone defense compounded this and what kept us from not even scoring a single point those last 8 minutes of regulation. Most of the time, to break down a zone, you need constant off-ball movement and crisp passing inside and out to get the zone out of sync and dysfunctional. That’s when you get open shots, solid penetration, and easy buckets. It’s very difficult to just a run a play with 10 seconds left (or try and penetrate to the lane and hope for the best) and succeed against a quality zone, and our offensive style those 8 minutes played right into Arizona State’s hands. Had we been up against a man-to-man defense, even in our protect offense, we probably would have gotten more penetration (off of screens, easier penetration when not against a zone, etc.) and better execution on last-ditch play-calls at the end of the shot clock than what transpired here.

Lastly, I’m kind of confused how you say I’m disagreeing with CBH. The only point I mentioned that he also brought up was the end-of-game substitutions/depth issue, and from what I can see, we were on the same page there.

Again, most of this is subjective, and there are a lot of ways you can dissect and analyze this game. Some of the words I used could have been better clarified, which is where I think a lot of our disagreements are stemming from. Regardless, it’s only one game, and I’m sure CBH and his staff will make the adjustments to keep what went wrong in this game from happening again.

You bet we will have some down the road. This was a good learning experience about what they never should do in future, if that ever happened again. Period. Even the CBS commentator repeatedly said UCLA needed to speed it up, instead of staying in that twenty five miles an hour deliberate tempo we saw in the last few minutes.

What I have confidence in a Howland coached team is that it rarely dwells, if ever, in the past mistakes. This is still early in the season. We will see how they play in Tempe.

That sums up Achilles’ post.

I am surprised that anyone thinks the refs played a hand in this game. They were SPTRs but that always goes both ways. If we think that the refs had a hand in this loss, then surely they were the sole cause of our wins against Stanford and Cal and A&M last year (as our opponents were saying).

Your statement that it was Shipp who fouled Harden 40 feet from the basket is correct, and it got me to thinking: Why was Shipp guarding Harden? As much as I’ve watched UCLA basketball over the past 5 years, I cannot for the life of me understand why Shipp would be our choice to defend Harden when ASU needs a basket and the entire gym knows that Harden will be the one to shoot. It’s a bad matchup, made worse by the game situation. Does Howland think that highly of Shipp’s defense? Or did he make a huge coaching mistake. Either way, I am concerned.

As I recall, when Collison got hurt, we had a major problem and had to stick some really raw, unproven guy into the line up. I think his name was Westbrook. Of course, things were different at that point – we had no other choice. But I wouldn’t be against letting one of our all-star youngsters see if he can perform.

Having said all that, I still think I’ll defer to Coach Howland on personnel decisions.