Bruins Change Two Questions Into Statements

Jelani McCoy and Kevin Dempsey, two very different UCLA Bruins who dropped out of sight recently while their team sagged, capped off twin revitalizations Saturday.

And as UCLA nears tournament time, two hard questions--Will its 18-year-old big man show up in crunch time? Can it get points off the bench?--are beginning to be answered.

“Everybody’s trying to step it up right now,” McCoy said after the Bruins’ 87-70 victory over Arizona State. “The tournament’s coming up, the Pac-10’s almost over, and we just want to keep getting better.”

Coupled with Stanford’s last-second loss to Oregon, UCLA (18-6, 11-2) has a two-game lead with five Pacific 10 Conference games left to play.

Time for a rebound? McCoy got 12 more of them (in addition to his team-high 21 points and six blocked shots) to key the Bruins’ once-vanished fastbreak before 12,061 at Pauley Pavilion. That followed his 13-rebound, seven-block performance Thursday against Arizona.

“McCoy’s played two strong, strong games, and when he plays like that, we are a very difficult team to contend with,” Coach Jim Harrick said, after noting that as a freshman, McCoy’s recent down period wasn’t unexpected.

Time for a rebirth? Dempsey, a rarely used senior, turned in his second consecutive sparkling performance off the bench, providing 10 points, two rebounds, three assists and two steals in 21 minutes--including the final 13:52, when UCLA blew open a tight contest.

For a flawed but sporadically brilliant Bruin team, this game was nothing different: Against the small Sun Devils, the 18th-ranked Bruins had a 13-point lead at halftime, but squandered the lead in a second-half spate of turnovers.

With 12:31 left, Arizona State, sparked by Ron Riley (27 points) and Jeremy Veal (25), had a 51-50 lead.

But with Dempsey subbing in at the high post, and McCoy denying everything but perimeter jump shots, the Bruins rumbled off on a 15-0 run--holding Arizona State scoreless for almost seven minutes--to put the Sun Devils away.

“They went to a bigger lineup, and we just could not handle it,” said Sun Devil Coach Bill Frieder, now 0-15 against UCLA.

McCoy has 80 blocks this season, breaking David Greenwood’s school record of 76; and mostly because of his towering presence, the Sun Devils (9-12, 4-9) shot only 36.2%.

When McCoy blocks and rebounds, the other Bruins said, UCLA is free to fly.

“The funner the game, the better we play,” said forward J.R. Henderson, who had 17 points and eight rebounds. “And he makes the game fun for us. When he’s blocking shots, that gets us going on the break, and that’s what we love to do, that’s what excites us.”

Said Dempsey of McCoy: “The difference is amazing. Their big guys just didn’t want to shoot--they were scared. They weren’t even making post moves, because, ‘Why should I make a move if he’s just going to block it, anyway?’

“And when he’s rebounding like he did today . . . He’s arms and shoulders above everybody else. He’s a big-time player.”

In his last huge performance before his lull, McCoy scored 21 points and had 10 rebounds Jan. 18 in UCLA’s easy victory at Tempe, Ariz. McCoy had not gotten more than seven rebounds--or scored more than 10 points--in the seven games between that one and Thursday’s one-point thriller over Arizona.

The Bruins went 4-3 in those seven games.

“I thought he just had a lull in the middle of the year,” Harrick said. “It’s a long year for him. But he got it back. He was a monster this weekend.”

Alongside the move of Cameron Dollar into the starting lineup and Kris Johnson to the reserves, Dempsey’s recent emergence could give the Bruins two potential bench scorers. A few games ago, the Bruins had none.

Dempsey, the only senior on this youthful team, said he has been biding his time.

“I just was being patient,” Dempsey said. “It just feels good to bust my butt in practice and then have a payoff in the game and not bust my butt in practice all week and take the weekend off.

“I felt at some point he’d have to give me a little chance to see what I could do.”