Sun Devils Are Likely to Be Without Sandle When They Take On Bruins

UCLA basketball Coach Walt Hazzard says the Pacific 10 champion could end the season with as many as six losses.

“There is not a great conference team,” he said. “Any given team can win any given time, even on the road. It’s going to be crazy.”

Tonight at 7:30, teams that best reflect that parity, UCLA and Arizona State, will play in UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion. UCLA has a 7-4 overall record and a 2-2 conference record; Arizona State is 7-6 and 1-2. By Hazzard’s reckoning, you might calculate, one of them will be halfway to the championship at game’s end, having achieved its third loss.

ASU would appear to be the team most eager to achieve that milestone, since it’s coming into town without its scoring leader and assorted cast members.

Interim coach Steve Patterson, the answer to a UCLA trivia question--who played center for the Bruins between the Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton years?--has not exactly been Mr. Nice Guy since taking over the troubled ASU program. Patterson, unmindful of the bottom-line approach to the season, has dropped two players from the team and now has suspended a third, star Chris Sandle.

Sandle’s problems might seem minor in other programs--missed curfews, team meetings and classroom problems--but loom large in Patterson’s. As a consequence, a 6-7 forward capable of providing more than 15 points a game is “highly unlikely” to be playing tonight.

The Sun Devils, winless on the road this season, will move 6-3 guard Steve Beck and his 10-point average into Sandle’s spot, and bring Bobby Thompson off the bench to play guard.

The Bruins have a similar problem in that Kelvin Butler, a starting forward much of the season, won’t suit up. His problem is somewhat more honorable, though. He suffered a partial tear of the abdominal muscle in Saturday’s 81-80 double-overtime victory over Washington State. He’s out indefinitely.

But if center Jack Haley, a 6-10 junior, contributes as he did last week, nobody will notice. Haley scored 10 points against Washington State and collected 17 rebounds, which Hazzard considered extremely “uplifting.”

Hazzard said: “He plays like that every day in practice. I never lost faith in him, just tried to relax him, to take the pressure off. It was most heartening to see him do it against Washington State.”

Except for practice, Haley had not exactly been a comet, though, never having scored more than six points and scoring as few as two in five straight games.

Bruin Notes ASU Coach Steve Patterson was never considered a star at UCLA, but the Bruins did manage to go 86-4 during his three years on the varsity. . . . Bruin Reggie Miller continues to lead the Pac-10 in scoring with a 24.5-point average. Only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Gail Goodrich averaged as many points as Bruins over a season. . . . The Bruins, who like Arizona State split conference games last week, will depart the Pac-10 schedule after the Arizona State game to play at Notre Dame Saturday. “It’s television,” UCLA Coach Walt Hazzard said. “It’s good for our program to keep the rivalry going and to do good on national TV. But the most important game this week is still ASU.”