Twice isn’t nice for UCLA

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Thursday night, UCLA cruised by Washington -- the Pac-10’s top team. Saturday afternoon, it fell to Washington State -- a program sitting close to the bottom of the standings.

In between, Coach Ben Howland insisted that quick turnarounds help his Bruins to prepare for the NCAA tournament. Apparently it’s a process of trial and lots of error.

It started when the Arizona schools visited, UCLA clubbing the Wildcats and collapsing against the Sun Devils. After recovering for a couple weeks, the process repeated out in the desert. UCLA played tough in a loss at Arizona State, then looked helpless against Arizona.

Now add in this weekend.

With time to prepare, UCLA is downright ruthless. Until the road loss to Arizona State, the Bruins had a winning streak in weekend openers that dated back more than four years.

If this trend is giving him sleepless nights, at least Howland can use the time to study film. He’s committed to the ‘one game at a time’ philosophy that has taken his team to three straight Final Fours. He won’t change any time soon, and he didn’t think the turnaround was the most important factor in the loss to Washington:

Howland wasn’t the only one talking about the team’s problems with defensive shooting percentage. Darren Collison said the cause was simply a matter of making mistakes and not putting up ball pressures.

Josh Shipp expanded on Collison’s explanation, saying that the mistakes were caused by a lack of effort. ‘We didn’t trail guys, we didn’t extend, we didn’t bump. We didn’t do the things we normally do.’

-- Adam Rose