Nestor, you have penned it correctly. When the team was struggling against both ASU and UA, they just “let it go” rather than someone stepping up on the floor and “making the rest of the team better” with vocal leadership. That is a key ingredient that is missing especially on the road.
Another thought with JS. He may stil be paying the price for the hip operation(s). He appears to try to do things in the middle that don’t get done against tough teams. He is endeavoring to do what needs to be done, but falls down, loses the dribble, gets tied up, etc. I don’t remember back to his freshman year if he had similar issues.
Bill

I was at both games (ugh, picked the wrong road trip to go on).

Our on ball defense is not up to Howland standards and that is causing the entire defense to break down much more then it has in previous seasons under Howland (they have to help more, making rotations and closeouts more difficult). We’ve always had “special” defenders that can lock down players without help from teammates (Bozeman, AA, Luc, etc.). We just don’t really have that this year, so guys like Harden and Budinger just kill us. DC is a good defender, obviously, but look at the rest of the lineup as on ball defenders. Holiday struggles and his help/rotations are sometimes awful. Josh has never been a great on ball defender. Dragovich is a Euro. PAA gives max effort but his post defense is technically shaky at times and he was repeatedly sealed off by Jordan Hill.

Our rebounding is not as strong as usual because our 4-spot is not a good rebounder and our center is more like a 4 as far as size and rebounding go. We have been getting killed on the boards at crucial times.

Offensively we’ve been a little worse then it appears. We’ve shot well, but during “tough/important” possessions we struggle because we have no inside game to go to in order to draw the foul. We never seal anybody off. KLove did it last year, but that’s completely gone from the offense. We just never get anyone on our hip for a drop step strong move and I think it really hurts our offense. We are often hesitant in important spots. Nobody seems to really want to take the tough/important shots. I mean, we ran down the shot clock several times late in the game against Arizona down by 8 or 9 points. WTF?

Anyway, those are some random thoughts from someone at the game. I don’t think it’s a
“leadership” problem. I think we are just physically limited defensively and down low and I’m not sure there’s much we are going to be able to do about it this season except take better care of the ball and continue to shoot well.

Oh, and I did see DC get irritated with JH a couple of times. ONe time JH failed in his defensive rotation late in the game and lazily avoided helping out, DC threw up his arms in frustration.

As a Typical Spoiled Bruin Fan who never saw a UCLA loss in person for 8 years despite going to most of the home games starting in 1967, the last couple of games were hard to take. But thankfully Steve Lavin broke me to a great extent of my unrealistic expectations for UCLA basketball.

Howland has begun to spoil me again somewhat, but I think I now have a better understanding of the nature of college basketball today. It just is really, really hard to stay on top when you keep losing top underclassmen to the NBA. You just can’t reload every year. Nobody can do it, not even the great Coach K or Coach Williams. Florida didn’t even make the tournament the year after winning back to back championships. That’s why Howland’s 3 straight Final Fours is such an outstanding achievement.

 I’m not saying they won’t do it again this year, but at this point there has been no replacing the defense and rebounding of Luc Richard, the rebounding and scoring of Love and the all-around game of Russell Westbrook. Our seniors are good solid players, but there is a reason why they are still on our team and not on an NBA roster. And as for our freshmen, they are like most freshmen in that they are not ready to step in and take charge. Love was a real anomaly in that regard. Jrue may turn out to be a really good NBA player and if he sticks around he may be a great Bruin player next year, but he hasn’t had the impact of a Kevin Love. It would be unreasonable to expect that he would.

So, to paraphrase from Dennis Green, “we are who we thought we were!” To the credit of the organizers of this site, I think that the prognostications as to how this team would do have been pretty much right on. There are still a number of games to play and opportunity for improvement. This team may still make a run, but if we wind up short of the Final Four, that’s just the way things are in today’s college basketball. We have another good recruiting class coming in and hopefully all of the fine freshmen will stick around. Coach Howland gives us about as much chance as possible to consistently challenge for a banner.

Is there a question as to whether this will be a special senior day? Based on the usual BN standards, where we don’t have a “championship or else” bar, I don’t see how this could be anything other than a special senior day.

DC could so easily have turned pro, but came back.
JS has battled through hip operations to represent his school.
PAA graduated with his BA but came back.

And these 3 were here during the final 4 runs.

I think they deserve our tribute on senior day regardless of how this season plays out.