Bruins Are Flat as They Waddle Past the Ducks

The UCLA basketball team showed again Thursday night that nothing brings out the worst in the Bruins more than a mediocre opponent.

After last-second victories over USC and Washington State, the two worst teams in the Pacific 10 Conference, the Bruins looked ghastly this time in an 80-74 victory over Oregon before a crowd of 6,422 at Pauley Pavilion.

Only the quality of the opposition made it possible for UCLA to improve its record to 13-5, including an 8-2 mark in Pac-10 games.

This was the same Oregon team that was destroyed by the Bruins, 97-66, last month in the Pit at Eugene, Ore.

“Sometimes, it’s a hard game for you as a coach to get your team mentally prepared for,” UCLA Coach Jim Harrick said.

How would Harrick describe the Bruins’ play?

“A little sluggish,” he said. “I’m not going to minimize it. Sometimes you play good, sometimes you play medium and sometimes you play not.”

Mostly, UCLA played not.

“I think we surely outhustled them,” Oregon Coach Don Monson said. “Maybe they took us a little bit for nothing.

“But a loss is a loss.”

In this case, the loss was the Ducks’ fourth straight. They have lost 6 of 7, 9 of 11 and haven’t won on the road since they beat Portland 2 months ago.

They are 7-12 overall and 2-7 in the Pac-10.

But on a night when they outrebounded the Bruins by a whopping 42-26 margin, they stayed close to UCLA most of the way.

Frank Johnson, a 6-foot 1-inch guard who led the Ducks with 17 points, also pulled down 12 rebounds, which was three more than the combined effort of UCLA’s Kevin Walker and Don MacLean, both of whom stand 6-10.

Richard Lucas, Oregon’s 6-7 center from Katella High in Anaheim, pulled down a game-high 16 rebounds.

“They beat us to the boards something horrible,” Harrick said. “Emotion plays a tremendous part. Anybody in Division I basketball has a lot of pride. They came down here and played a little bit better than we did. It’s how you catch a team on a given night.”

Oregon caught UCLA flat.

“We just weren’t as sharp as we’d like to be,” Harrick said.

Still, the Bruins had five players in double figures, including MacLean and Pooh Richardson, who each scored 19 points.

Trevor Wilson contributed 17 points and 10 rebounds, Walker scored 10 points and freshman Darrick Martin made 9 of 9 free throws and scored 13 points, all in the second half.

Oregon got 13 points each from Lucas and David Blair.

“They execute their offense better than any team I’ve played against,” Harrick said of the Ducks. “They get a lot of open shots.”

But, more often than not, they miss them.

The Ducks shot only 43%, UCLA shot 53%.

So how did they stay so close to the Bruins?

“They played their guts out,” Harrick said. “Sometimes teams will come in and take you out of sync. They came in and really scrapped and hustled.”

UCLA forged a 66-58 lead with a 7-0 run that included a 3-point shot by Richardson, a jumper by MacLean and two free throws by Martin.

Almost 9 minutes remained, but Oregon never cut its deficit to fewer than four points the rest of the way.

“We played about 32 minutes of pretty good basketball,” Monson said of the Ducks, who have beaten only USC and Washington State in the last 6 1/2 weeks and had lost each of their last two games by 22 points.

Harrick called the Ducks “10 times better” than they were in their last meeting with the Bruins. UCLA, he said, was “kind of fortunate.”

But a win is a win.

“I just wanted to win this one to get us going into the stretch drive,” Harrick said.

He got that.

But not much more.

Still, UCLA’s 8-2 conference record amounts to its best start in Pac-10 play since the 1982-83 team won its first 9 conference games.

Has Harrick come to expect his team to play poorly against poor teams?

“Don’t expect it,” he said. “Don’t want it.”

He keeps getting it, though.

Bruin Notes

Coach Jim Harrick’s concern about the health of Don MacLean was much ado about nothing. Blood tests taken on MacLean were negative and the freshman forward, who lost more than 10 pounds last month, was pronounced fit by assistant team physician James Puffer. “I think he needs to be home and have a couple of home-cooked meals,” said MacLean’s mother, Pat. “He didn’t have this problem when he lived at home.”

The rehabilitation of Gerald Madkins, who broke his pelvis in a moped accident last summer, has progressed well, Harrick said, and Madkins has been able to dunk recently in practice. “Every day I can do something I couldn’t do the day before,” said Madkins, who is expected to have a plate removed from his pelvis this month.

Reserve guard Kevin Williams and assistant coach Paul Landreaux stayed home with the flu. . . . UCLA will play Oregon State Sunday at 3 p.m. at Pauley Pavilion, and the game will be televised on Channel 2. . . . MacLean needs 16 points against Oregon State to surpass Rod Foster as UCLA’s all-time leading freshman scorer. MacLean had 25 points and 10 rebounds last month in an 82-69 loss to the Beavers at Corvallis, Ore.