As the first weekend of Madness winds down this Sunday evening and the Sweet-16 teams shape up, let's put the focus back on our Bruins this Sunday night.
Tracy Pierson over at Bruin Report Online (BRO) is one of the most informed and astute analysts in college hoops. I have followed his work over at BRO from the days he was at Rivals.com before making his switch over to Scout. He along with Greg Hicks are probably two of the most knowlegeable professional reporters following UCLA hoops, who know more about our Bruins than any traditional reporters/basketball pundits in the country. I have always considered BRO an invaluable resource for any UCLA fans, who wants to stay plugged in, want to get the big picture when it comes to Bruin athtletics.
Anyways why am I bringing up Tracy and BRO?
Well after last night's game we have been reading lot of the same nonsense we were reading during the last year's tourney run, when so called experts around the country were whining about the style of Ben Ball. Well Tracy's game report on the IU game was so poignant that we requested whether he would consider it making it a non-subscription based article. Tracy kindly agreed and we urge everyone to read Tracy's post game report which absolutely eviscerates the so called morons who are out theire complaining about ugly basketball. Here are the money grafs:
Man, there are many people out there watching basketball who don't know basketball.
That was not an ugly game.
Ugly games are riddled with turnovers, bad shot selection, and bad decisions.
UCLA committed only 10 turnovers, while Indiana had 12. UCLA played one of the smartest games I've watched in the NCAA tournament. There were probably only a couple of decisions you could consider bad - James Keefe stepping over the endline as he's inbounding the ball, and Alfred Aboya fouling Lance Stemler from three with a little over a minute left in the game and the Bruins up by just four points, which really gave the Hoosiers a breathe of life but also killed Aboya, it being his fifth foul.
But that's only two "ugly" plays in 40 minutes. The rest of the game consisted of some pretty well-played basketball, by both teams: Excellent defense, good execution on offense, good coaching and good decision-making.
It really is a device, a divining rod, if you will, you can use to separate the people who know basketball from those who don't. Don't say anything about the game and let an individual speak. If he calls the game ugly, don't listen to his opinion again about basketball ever again.
The biggest example of someone talking about the game, calling it ugly, who doesn't know basketball: Steve Lavin on ESPN. He wouldn't recognize good, well-played basketball if it bit him on the ass. Just to jolt some memories, if you can handle it, if you ever get a chance and see an old UCLA Lavin game on one of the cable channels - that's "ugly" basketball. Playing no defense, executing no offense, jacking up shots, and playing with very little inspiration - that's ugly. The fact that Lavin is the guy leading the charge of calling the UCLA/Indiana game "ugly" says it all.
I couldn't have written that any better.
Make sure to read the entire article. Again as I said above that is just one of many examples of the kind of work product coming from Tracy and Hicks on BRO, which I find well worth my annual subscription.
So let's stop with the whining about Ben Ball and think about how we are going to match up with Pitt.
GO BRUINS.