Despite a victory, it’s not exactly happy trails for Bruins

Quite possibly the ugliest 15-point win in the history of UCLA basketball began with a bus trip to bonkers.

Every team in the Pac-12 tournament is staying in a hotel across the street from Staples Center, and every team but one simply walks to the arena.

Ben Howland’s Bruins are the exception. They travel the block by bus. Before their first-round game with USC on Wednesday, Bruins center Josh Smith was four minutes late for that bus.

Smith walked across the street and arrived at the locker room before the team, only to discover he was being benched in the first half because he was late for a bus that was, well, later than him.

There’s something really weird about all this, right?

Said Howland: “He hasn’t been late one other time the whole year ... but I don’t care ... this is too big and too important.”

Said Smith: “Don’t get me wrong, I was late. But I still beat the bus here.”

Yeah, the chaos continues, the final days of Howland’s toughest winter becoming even more maddening after the Bruins won by a 15-point margin that should have been at least twice that much.

The final score was 55-40, meaning the Bruins advance to the second round against Arizona on Thursday, meaning their tortured season will last at least 24 more hours.

That is not necessarily a good thing.

Judging from the confusion and frustration that filled their faces and hung from their forms, it was difficult to tell which team was in the process of losing for the 19th time in 20 games.

That would be the ragtag Trojans, who were more focused, more composed, and far more industrious against a team with a busload — sorry — more talent.

“I want to make a point that all of our players that were left standing throughout the end of the year did a great job of playing as hard as they could at all times,” said Trojans Coach Kevin O’Neill, who coached them just as hard. “That says a lot about them as people and as players, and I appreciate their efforts.”

At this point, I can’t imagine Howland saying the same thing about his Bruins. Sometimes it seems like Howland and his players don’t like each other. Other times it seems like they don’t even know each other. Howland says the resurfacing of reports of player-coach discomfort in last week’s Sports Illustrated brought the team together — “We became tighter, look at our two wins after the story broke,” Howland said — but on Wednesday, that was hard to tell.

The game began, fittingly, with both teams standing on the floor awkwardly unable to begin warmups because of one tiny missing accessory. Believe it or not, somebody forgot to bring the basketballs.

When the game began, both teams were wishing they still didn’t have the basketballs, but we’ll focus on UCLA here because, c’mon, as crazy as it might sound, the Bruins were once a basketball powerhouse, and shouldn’t they always at least play like they remember that?

The Bruins made just two of their first 13 shots in a first half that included an airball free throw, a missed dunk and body language on the bench that included giant sighs and shrugs and looks of hopelessness.

But UCLA could always gain energy from its pep band, right? Not so fast. Half of the regular pep band was at the nearby women’s tournament game, so only about 20 Bruins musicians blared a muted sound and you wondered, there’s nobody else at that giant school who had a trumpet and some time?

But then, hey, maybe the presence of Dan Guerrero would be an inspiration? Not quite. The Bruins athletic director and his wife were featured on the scoreboard Kiss Cam but, instead of rooting for a smooch, fans rained him with boos.

The first half ended appropriately with UCLA, after making all of seven baskets, running off the floor with one second remaining on the scoreboard clock. The only Bruin left behind was Lazeric Jones, and he started laughing, and who could blame him?

“It was definitely an ugly game with no real flow to it,” said David Wear.

And then came the second half, and then, it somehow got uglier with the insertion of Smith into the lineup. Because there was no communication between the coach and the schools’ publicity staff, nobody seemed to know why he missed the first half, leading to a televised guess that he had suffered a concussion, which probably needlessly scared his friends and family.

Once it was obvious that Smith was playing, everyone sighed ... then everyone winced when he picked up three quick fouls and gave the scorer’s table a huge jolting kicking it on his way to the bench.

Smith obviously thought he had, well, been thrown under the bus.

But, seriously, coach, why do you even take a bus?

“Last year we walked and it’s going through a tunnel and walking through people that are out drinking and hanging out in L.A. Live ... so I wanted to avoid that this year,” said Howland.

There were people drinking and hanging out in L.A. Live on Wednesday afternoon instead of inside the Staples Center watching this mess? Lucky them.

bill.plaschke@latimes.com

twitter.com/billplaschke