Well hello there everyone. Get used to a new addition for our lexicon. Ben Ball Poodles. At least yours truly will be using that to refer to Ben Howland's mentally soft and IQ challenged basketball "team" for rest of this. The final score was not surprising because we all saw this coming. Mike Montgomery's Cal Bears decided to show up the play today instead of taking our BBPs for granted, and as a result predictably ran away with it on our home court at Pauley.
The final score was 72-58. Here is the box score. I hope all those who showed up at Pauley really enjoyed the good vibes and feelings around one of the worst basketball teams in UCLA's history. Yeah, so much for all the false sense of comfort they have been generating after getting by against some horrible Pac-10 teams in recent games. The Bruins came out on "fire." They looked "pretty" early on with some fancy passing during when they actually try to set up each other with open shots.
Ben Ball Poodles looked really "pretty" after Tyler Honeycutt slammed it down to the Bruins up 24-11 with 10 minutes left in the first. I am sure they were people snickering around Pauley at people who have doubting what has been going on with program all season long. Somehow they forgot how these mentally soft BBPs looked "pretty" just like they did on the road against Notre Dame going up 26-20 with 7:48 left in the first half. They looked "pretty" just like they did on the road against Oregon going up by 24-13 with 7:13 left in the first half.
If there is one person who is responsible for another pathetic and embarrassing performance at Pauley, it is none other than Ben Howland. His ineffective rotation and game management once again blew up all over his face (CBS had a telling statistics towards end of the game how Bruins hardly ever come through when the Bruins are down during the crunch time). More on our poodles after the flip.
Let's start with Malcolm Lee. The delusional one who apparently has been hearing all the sweet talk about how he was NBA material, once again looked completely lost and ineffective as a starting point guard. Sure he had couple of nice drives but overwhelming majority of the time he looked unsure, insecure and completely indecisive with the ball. Plus he cannot shoot. He was so bad that at times even Jerime Anderson looked to be a better option at 1 and Jerime didn't even have a good game.
Speaking of not having a good game, really what else I have to say about our Rainbow warrior from Belgrade. Howland's Matt Barkley once again stunk up the joint and played a huge role in the another embarrassing performance at Pauley. The shooter bricklayer went 1 for 8 from the FT line, and also bricked 3 important FTs (after not being able to convert layups) in second half. Of course this doesn't include how he didn't play much defense (yeah I know he took couple of offensive charges) and as usual didn't make much of an effort to box out and get the defensive rebounds down low.
It was a little telling (for the whole world except for Ben Howland) when the Bruins made their second half run to close the gap within 3 points. Most of that run took place when Ragovic was toweling himself on the bench and the defense was actually playing 5 on 5. Yet despite the run, the Bruins just didn't have enough in their tank as they folded looking lost, confused and tired. Wait I forget the real reason they lost was because the way Howland's bench of Lane, Moser and Bobo f*cked it all up for us when he put them in with an 11 point lead in the first half.
Where do the Bruins go from here? No where really. I will tell you where we are headed. We are going to be celebrating a moral victory against Southern Cal next week before most likely getting swept in Washington. We are going to be favored in only two games - Oregon and Oregon State - for rest of the season.
Yeah, I am really holding my breath over the Pac-10 tournament to get us in the Big Dance. We are going to come back next year with an inexperienced team (thanks to all the minutes wasted on the scrubs in this year's team) and deal with the possibility of Tyler Honeycutt high tailing out to the NBA as soon as he gets a little whiff of the first round. Other than that, I will leave it up to pump in all the sunshine and rainbows, you can muster up in this post game thread. How about all that good vibe in Pauley?!
GO BRUINS.