UCLA, Looking to Close Gap, Plays Arizona : College basketball: Wildcats have won eight of their last nine games against the Bruins, including four in a row.

Coach Jim Harrick said this week that he would like to restore the UCLA basketball program to the point where it is again mentioned in the same breath with Indiana, Duke and North Carolina.

“Those are the teams I respect the most,” Harrick said.

And what about Arizona?

The Bruins have spent the last several years simply trying to catch up to the Wildcats, who have won four consecutive Pacific 10 Conference championships and five in the last six years.

The Wildcats have won eight of their last nine games against UCLA, including four in a row. They haven’t lost at home to the Bruins, before raucous McKale Center crowds, since the 1986-87 season.

And Coach Lute Olson’s team has been ranked higher than UCLA--as well as having been seeded higher in the NCAA tournament--at the end of each of the last four seasons.

“ Catch up isn’t the (phrase) I would use,” said Harrick, who is 1-6 against Arizona. “But theirs is a program that we’ve tried to emulate within the conference. (Pause) I guess catch up is the (phrase).”

In Harrick’s first season at UCLA, with freshmen Don MacLean and Darrick Martin in the starting lineup, the Bruins were ambushed at Arizona, 102-64, absorbing the worst loss in their history.

“We kind of got embarrassed,” Martin said this week.

The Bruins, though, have narrowed the gap considerably going into today’s showdown with the Wildcats at McKale Center, where Arizona has won 71 consecutive games, the nation’s longest home-court winning streak.

“This is the best UCLA team I’ve seen in nine years I’ve been here,” Olson said. “They have an offensive threat at every position, they have excellent athletes and they’ve been playing the best defense I’ve seen a UCLA team play.”

After defeating Arizona State, 83-62, Thursday night in its Pac-10 opener, UCLA is 9-0, its best start in 17 years, and ranked second, its highest position in the national polls since the 1982-83 season.

Sixth-ranked Arizona is 10-1 after beating USC, 107-68.

“They’ve had a pretty successful program,” MacLean said of the Wildcats, “but I feel confident in the fact that this is probably the best team we’ve had coming in here.

“But I can’t really say we’ve caught up to them, or whatever.”

Not yet, anyway.

UCLA hasn’t forgotten the heartache of last season, when it was in position to sweep the Wildcats but wound up losing two emotional games.

At Tucson last January, Arizona scored six points in the last four seconds of an 82-77 victory after a three-point shot by Tracy Murray had given the Bruins a 77-76 lead with 28 seconds left.

And at Pauley Pavilion last February, Arizona won in overtime, 105-94, after Chris Mills of the Wildcats recovered a loose ball and scored on a baseline jumper that barely beat the buzzer, forcing the extra period.

Arizona went on to win the Pac-10 title with a 14-4 record.

UCLA was second at 11-7.

“The other teams really took us out, more so than them,” UCLA’s Gerald Madkins said. “(The Wildcats) won the Pac-10, sure enough, but they just played better against the rest of the pack than we did. That’s what killed us.

“We’ve stayed right there on their butts (in) head-on matchups, but for some reason, we just don’t play as well against other teams.”

The Bruins are confident they can win at McKale Center, where no visiting team has won since March 13, 1987, when Texas El Paso defeated Arizona in overtime in an NCAA tournament game.

“We know now that they can be beaten in their house, and we can do it,” Martin said.