Bruins Lost Their Ball in Ivy

INDIANAPOLIS — A Princeton education is a valuable thing, and Thursday night, UCLA got one. It came in the form of a 43-41 expulsion from the NCAA basketball tournament’s Southeast Regional, where the Bruins played the final 6 minutes 13 seconds without scoring a point and appropriately ended the game with an airball.

From his courtside seat, Reggie Miller of the Indiana Pacers would have made one of his famous “choke” gestures, had his alma mater not been involved. Instead, when Miller was shown on TV screens pointing to his powder-blue UCLA cap, with his school leading, 39-34, the fans in his home NBA arena loudly booed.

And the Bruins understood it. Certainly not because they had behaved poorly, or refused to hustle, but because they were playing so dreadfully against a bunch of Ivy Leaguers who made them look and feel foolish. UCLA was held to 34 points over the game’s final 38 minutes. Its starting front line--Charles O’Bannon, J.R. Henderson and Jelani McCoy--combined for a total of 12.

In the end, Princeton’s lesson was right out of a fifth-grader’s gym class, an Etch-a-Sketch back-door diagram that had UCLA’s defense spinning like tops. Unable to hold that Tiger, UCLA let a 6-5 freshman named Gabe Lewullis slip behind them and score with 3.9 seconds to play, as easily as a pregame layup drill.

The defending national champions were finished, even though they were able to call one final timeout and get off one final shot. Making things worse, UCLA guard Cameron Dollar drove the length of the court, same as Tyus Edney did to save last season’s Missouri game, and scored, only to learn that his teammate Kris Johnson had already called time.

Fans in the stands booed again when officials restored precious extra time to the clock, changing it from 1.3 seconds to 2.2. Waving pompoms in Princeton’s colors, fans from Mississippi State, the winners’ next opponent, lustily booed along. Princeton’s straw-hatted pep band, meantime, played the theme from the cartoon program “Underdog.”

UCLA got one last shot, a good one. But after missing everything on a routine two-point baseline shot on which he would draw iron probably 990 of 1,000 times, UCLA sophomore Toby Bailey stood in disbelief, hands on knees, while TV lenses materialized in his face. Had Bailey made it, UCLA would have gone to overtime. He missed, so UCLA goes home.

Bitterly disappointed, Bailey said of Princeton: “They’re deceptively good. When you look at some of their players, you might not go out after them as fast as you would with some other teams.

“They were playing with nothing to lose. That back-door play, I don’t know how they got that through. We had arms everywhere. They just kind of stunned us. When we were tied there near the end of the game, we just said, ‘How is this happening?’ ”

That was how practically everyone from the UCLA side felt, among them Coach Jim Harrick, whose yearlong grace period from winning the national championship was extended about as long as it took him to appear at a postgame news conference and hear himself being asked: “Were you outcoached by Pete Carril tonight?”

Zig-zagging again from worst to first to worst in tournament performance, Harrick’s squad looked strong for a few minutes, then crashed and burned. Princeton did not score a point for nearly five full minutes, and had nothing to show for the game’s first 14:35 except four three-point baskets.

But as the evening progressed, UCLA committed one turnover after another, Dollar and Bailey repeatedly losing possession with careless passes, Henderson being benched for most of the second half and McCoy getting completely neutralized by a team with a 6-7 center. He contributing two points the entire night.

Things got so gruesome, the Pac-10 champions looked to the end of their bench for Brandon Loyd, a little and little-used freshman, who said later, “It was my kind of game, slow-tempo and a need for outside shooting. I guess that’s why they put me in there.”

It helped. Loyd scored six points, more than McCoy, Henderson and Dollar combined. But for the most part, UCLA’s offense was flat-footed and ineffectual, and, like so many opponents of Carril-coached teams, unable to make any sort of successful penetration through the lane. The old gray coach is retiring, but he isn’t through teaching.

Harrick’s top assistant, Lorenzo Romar, who is leaving himself to be head coach at Pepperdine, said after UCLA’s defeat, “I wish I wasn’t involved in this game, because I’m happy for Coach Carril.”

Princeton’s players said they could see it from the expressions of their opponents that UCLA was totally rattled. Once the national champions fell, Tiger guard Sydney Johnson spread his arms toward the stands and shouted: “We did it! Princeton in, UCLA out!”

Class of ’96 dismissed.