After slow start, Bruins get their get-right game after all
LOS ANGELES >> This was supposed to be a getright game, OK?
UCLA, once ranked No. 8 in the AP women's basketball poll, was reeling from an excruciating losing streak — three losses by a combined 10 points, and two of those in overtime. And the Bruins were playing Arizona State, which came into the noon tipoff 0-11 in Pac12 play.
“We're three possessions away from being 213,” coach Cori Close said. “Like, that's really what it comes down to. And we let leads deep in the fourth quarter go.
“And so this was about earning a mindset.”
So when UCLA started out with turnovers on its first two possessions Sunday, going 1 for 6 from the field and not coming up with an offensive rebound in the first 3½ minutes, it shouldn't have been a surprise when Close made three quick substitutions, to send a message.
Message received. The Bruins (18-6, 7-5 in the Pac-12) had their first comfortable finish in a month, hitting the gas in the fourth quarter in an 82-63 victory at Pauley Pavilion.
“Especially in the second half, I just said,
`If you want to stay on the floor, keep making stops,'” Close said. “You (lapse in) defensive intensity or you're not talking, you're coming out. I said, it will mess with our rhythm, but it's that important to me. It's that important to me that you understand (the importance of) our defense, our intensity, our having each other's backs.”
UCLA held ASU (now 7-16 and 0-12) to 39% shooting for the game but 5 for 15 in the final 10 minutes. And once the Bruins had a relatively comfortable margin, 6750 with 6:47 left after companion 8-2 and 12-2 runs, you could see them relax in a good way.
Players made plays — Charisma Osborne with an inside basket with a degree of difficulty of 9, or Londynn Jones hitting Gabriela Jaquez with a three-quarters-court pass for a fast-break basket. Or grad student point guard Gina Conti scoring on a dipsy-doo move off a pass from Osborne, and then grabbing a rebound and going coast to coast to score a couple of possessions later.
Maybe they just needed to get out of their own heads.
“We were just like, `We're going to focus on us,' and it's everyone's responsibility to watch the film on their own and figure out what we need to do to stop them,” said Osborne, who finished with 23 points, five rebounds and four assists Sunday and moved into 15th on the school's all-time scoring list.
“But I think we're really just focused on how can we be better as a team, as teammates. How can you get somebody else a good shot and how can you give to your team? So I think that was just really the main focus for us players.”
It was a John Wooden maxim back in the day on this campus that a loss at the right time wasn't necessarily a bad thing, if it got players to concentrate on the task at hand. Three straight would seem to be overdoing it a bit, but this skid certainly got everyone's attention.
The trick was handling it the right way.
“The reality is that it really goes back to your attitude and your response, and if it elicits changes in behavior, if it ... changes the mindset of the team, if it brings people together,” Close said. “But I think whenever you have really big adversity, it can take you either way. And you have to choose the next right step. It doesn't happen to you. It doesn't happen for you. You have to choose it and make it happen. So I think it's possible, but you have to earn it.”
Close talked about how the Bruins' director of mental conditioning, Colin Henderson, reminded them that “the biggest distance is from our heads to our hearts, and we have to fight for that distance . ... I think we know we're talented. I think in our heads we know we can do it. But in our hearts we were sort of wondering, `Why did we let that go? What happened there? I mean, are we as good as we thought we were?'
“Especially with a young team, and we have nine players that are new this year that have not played together. Nine. And so this is a brand new experience for this group. And so that's really what I'm focused on is, I'm focused in on that distance from our heads to our hearts.
“... Honestly, this group wants to win. They don't always know what they look like or what they need to change, or sometimes they need to understand that there's a ramp-up in intensity that needs to happen.”
Jones, the 5-foot-4 freshman from Corona Centennial who finished with 20 points in 23:31 Sunday, her second 20-point game in a row and fourth straight in double figures, is the receptacle of a lot of those expectations.
“I'm really hard on this one because I think she could be just a differencemaker,” Close said. “I don't want her to see herself as just a scorer. She's been phenomenal in that. But you know what she's like on long rebounds? Do you know what she's like when she gets in screening actions? I want her to take pride in that. I want her to be an elite basketball player, not just an elite scorer. And so my responsibility is to challenge her because I love her and I believe in her that much.”
And how does the player respond to such demands?
“You always want a coach that pushes you to the limits,” she said. “And it's very much appreciated because you don't get better unless that happens.
“But yeah, I mean, I like it. I love it. I mean, I would tell her to challenge me all the time. She'll slip things in and I'm like, okay. So it's things like that that keep me going, things like that that get me excited and bring that dog out of me, so it's very much appreciated.”
That, folks, is buy-in.