I mentioned yesterday how Diane Pucin's "game report" in yesterday's LA Times came across with a tone, which was nothing short of needless whining. Since then, we gotten some emails from readers pointing out that she may have been either outright lying or misreporting about the game atmosphere at Pauley as well. Here is what Diane wrote yesterday:
There was no dominating dunking or resounding rebounding or showy shot-making to carry the top-ranked Bruins to their 74-53 win over the Grizzlies (6-7) of Rochester, Mich., who made their fourth stop in a five-game traveling show.
But there was an 18-0 run over the final 4 minutes 12 seconds of the first half and the first 2:23 of the second that pushed UCLA from a 21-19 lead to a 39-19 advantage in front of 8,612 unimpressed fans who earlier had let go a few grumpy boos.
Well, per our readers (and friends who were at the game), Diane must have been at some other game besides the UCLA one, because there were absolutely no boos heard at Pauley. If anything, Diane might have heard the crowd/student section cheering "Luuuuuuuuc," and since she apparently wasn't paying any attention or has no idea about the stories of other UCLA players (except for Shipp) she might have mistook that sound as boos. So, either Diane was just lying, or she was just being lazy, sloppy and misreporting about what happened during UCLA's basketball game.But there was an 18-0 run over the final 4 minutes 12 seconds of the first half and the first 2:23 of the second that pushed UCLA from a 21-19 lead to a 39-19 advantage in front of 8,612 unimpressed fans who earlier had let go a few grumpy boos.
In any event, I have been meaning to write this for a while. Pucin's coverage of UCLA, yes, the number one team in America, which won the conference and went all the way to the national title game, is a joke. It's a shame, and it is just embarrassing for a newspaper that tries to hold itself out as one of the premier news sources in the country, if not the world.
Pucin's so called game "report" doesn't really tell us much about actually what happened at the games. Frankly, she sounds like she knows nothing about the details of this game, otherwise, she wouldn't brush her reports up with superfluous information about how there wasn't "dominating dunking" in the game. If she actually appreciated this sport at all, she'd be talking about how Howland's boys refocused after coming out a little slow, and put the game away with their defensive intensity. If she were actually interested in Howland's in-game strategies, perhaps she'd ask the questions and find answers wrt to Howland's decision to take timeouts after made baskets during the later part of the game.
Pucin sounds disinterested, bored, and totally dispassionate about college basketball. Why the h*ll, then, the LA Times is assigning this sloppy/bad "reporter" to cover the beat of the number 1 college basketball team in America? Any ideas?
GO BRUINS.