Column: From heroes to zero: After playing Arizona tough in regulation UCLA goes scoreless in overtime

The resilient UCLA basketball team played a brilliant regulation basketball game Friday night, battling through exhaustion to hang with heavyweight Arizona for 40 sweat-soaked minutes.

But then the buzzer sounded and the short-handed Bruins were introduced to the one opponent they could not handle.

Overtime.

The tie game required five more minutes, and the Bruins didn’t have enough left for five more seconds. Their shots clanked, their legs wobbled, their judgment failed.

In regulation, the Bruins scored 67 points. In overtime, they scored zero.

In the end, Arizona used an 11-0 overtime shutout to take a 78-67 victory in the semifinals of the Pac-12 Tournament at T-Mobile Arena.

“UCLA did not score in overtime,” Arizona coach Sean Miller said afterward, as if he had just seen a unicorn.

Steve Alford shook his head wearily, sighed, and acknowledged that same unicorn.

“It was 11-0 in that overtime,” the Bruins coach said.

The Wildcats bounced off the court and into their fourth tournament championship game in five years, this time against USC here Saturday night.

The Bruins trudged off the court as semifinal losers to the Wildcats for a second straight year, and now must wait for Sunday to learn their seeding in the NCAA tournament.

They’re surely in. They might be a double-digit seed, but with 21 wins and a strong finish, they’re surely in.

“I think we’ve done enough to show that we’ve passed the eye test, and I think our body of work proves it,” Alford said.

The best thing about the NCAA tournament for the Bruins is that they won’t have to play again until late next week. They will finally get some serious rest. They have been playing without three potentially key bench players since three of their freshmen were suspended for shoplifting in China back in November just days before the season opener. They’ve been fighting to catch their breath ever since.

“Always good to get rest,” guard Aaron Holiday said late Friday night in an otherwise silent locker room. “It’s much needed.”

It’s especially needed by Holiday, the Bruins’ best player who was the only guy to play all 45 minutes Friday, giving him 40-plus minutes in consecutive games for the first time this season and for the sixth time in seven games.

In the overtime, it showed.

He was short on a layup. He clanked a three-pointer. He was short on another three-pointer. All of this happened after he was short on a three-pointer at the regulation buzzer. Holiday finished with 15 points, one rebound and three assists as he struggled all game to find his footing.

“I feel fine,” Holiday said, then quickly added, “Obviously tired playing a lot of minutes.”

It wasn’t just Holiday gasping at the end. It was everyone, throughout each of the five painful minutes, the predominantly Arizona crowd ringing their ears with consistently louder “U of A” chants as the Wildcats struck quick and pulled away slow.

“They came out with a stronger intensity than us,” freshman Kris Wilkes said of the Wildcats in overtime. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t fight back. We tried, but it didn’t work out.”

Wilkes, who had a brilliant dunk down the stretch, began the Bruins’ overtime attack by dribbling a ball off his leg out of bounds. Then UCLA big men lost a couple of defensive rebounds that became Arizona points. Inconsistent freshman Jaylen Hands, whose banking layup tied the score with eight seconds remaining in regulation, missed two crazy three-point attempts.

It was all pretty much a mess, and actually not much of a surprise. Because so many of their players have been forced into different roles with the loss of the freshmen, UCLA is a team that has teetered on a tightrope all season. Those final five minutes were just enough to knock the Bruins off.

Oh yeah, that and a career-high 32 points by Arizona’s lottery center Deandre Ayton, who was virtually unstoppable with seven of Arizona’s 11 overtime points against a weathered duo of Thomas Welsh and GG Goloman.

“He should be player of the year in the country,” Arizona’s Rawle Alkins said of Ayton. “I don’t see anybody playing better than him right now.”

Ayton overshadowed a fine regulation performance by Welsh, who had 17 points and 17 rebounds with a trio of three-pointers and probably would have been the best big man on the floor against any other team.

But both he and Golomon seemed wiped out in an overtime in which the Wildcats outrebounded the Bruins, 10-1 while scoring on second chances, in the paint, and with five free throws.

In a discrepancy that Alford danced around after the game, overall the Wildcats shot 18 free throws while the quicker Bruins shot only four, with only Holiday and Goloman going to the line.

“It’s unfortunate we couldn’t find ways of getting ourselves to the free-throw line,” Alford said in syllables of careful restraint.

But failure to draw fouls is also a sign of failure to engage, and the heavy-legged Bruins slowly stopped penetrating.

Asked if his team was exhausted, Alford acknowledged, “I’m sure, I’m sure.”

He added, “We were probably a little bit run down. But at the same token, they had three guys play 40-plus minutes as well. So that’s not an excuse.”

The Bruins actually started a slow fade at the start of the second half, when their 30-26 lead quickly evaporated as Arizona matched its first-half output in less than eight minutes after the halftime break. From there, the Bruins continued to hang on, but barely, until they finally dropped.

“The second half, they got away from us in those first eight minutes, they took off, we were able to get back, but they fought harder,” Wilkes said.

No, the Wildcats didn’t fight harder. They just had more fight left. There is a difference. On this most dramatic yet predictable of nights, that difference became a knockout punch.

bill.plaschke@latimes.com

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