Wooden’s Five Favorite Teams : UCLA: They weren’t the ones with Alcindor or Walton, but they were winners, and in some cases, NCAA champions.

Of the 27 UCLA basketball teams coached by John Wooden, 19 won conference championships, 12 reached the Final Four and 10 won national championships.

Wooden holds five teams most dear:

--In the 1948-49 season, Wooden’s first at UCLA, the Bruins rebounded from a 12-13 season under former coach Wilbur Johns and won the Pacific Coast Conference Southern Division championship.

“I’m new, a stranger; I’m trying to get settled,” Wooden said. “I’d already felt that I wasn’t accepted because I’d turned down some cocktail parties. . . .

“We were picked to finish last in our conference, unanimously, and we won the conference, won 22 games, finished 22-7. And to do what was so completely unexpected, it gave me great pleasure.”

--UCLA reached the Final Four for the first time in 1962, losing in the semifinals to Cincinnati on a last-second shot, 72-70.

UCLA was only 18-11 that season.

“(But) we very easily could have won the game, and I think we would have won the championship,” said Wooden, who saw Cincinnati beat Ohio State in the final. “We were not a good team at the start of the season, but I never had a team improve more than that team.

“While it was one of my poorer records, to have a team improve so much--to where you’re practically as good as the champion--that gave me great satisfaction.”

--With no player taller than 6 feet 5, the Bruins started their national championship run in 1964, winning all 30 of their games in the first of their four unbeaten seasons.

“The smallest team ever to win it,” Wooden said. “A very exciting team, with the press (a key element to UCLA’s success). I think that team came as close to reaching its potential as a team could come.”

--Wooden calls the 1970-71 Bruins, “The Team Without.”

“We not only lost (Lew) Alcindor (to graduation), but some other very fine players (among them three-year starter Lynn Shackelford and two-year starter Kenny Heitz),” Wooden said. “Even (rival) coaches had said, ‘Wait till Alcindor’s gone. They’ll get their comeuppance.’ ”

With Alcindor--later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar--gone, Wooden reinstated his high-post offense, and the Bruins, behind forwards Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe, won another NCAA title.

“We didn’t have a great center in Steve Patterson, but he fit a role,” Wooden said. “We had a lot of close games--I think more than in the three Alcindor years put together--but, by golly, they just wouldn’t lose.”

--With only one returning starter from the previous season, senior forward David Meyers, UCLA won its 10th NCAA championship in 1975, beating Kentucky in the final only two days after Wooden had announced his retirement.

“My last (championship) was unexpected, too,” Wooden said. “We lost four starters (from 1974)--two superstars in Bill Walton and Keith Wilkes, and two guards (Greg Lee and Tommy Curtis) who had been starters for two seasons. So, we started the season with little or no experience, and still we won the championship.”