Bruins Pick Up the Early Pieces

Thanks to a season-opening loss, UCLA was home for the holiday, stuck on an 0-1 record and sweating out answers to some early questions.

After their Preseason NIT loss to Tulsa on Nov. 20 had capped a whirlwind two weeks of off-court turmoil, the Bruins’ season, which was supposed to include the NIT final in New York during the Thanksgiving weekend, hit a long patch of practice, preparation and pondering.

The team inherited by Steve Lavin had 13 days between games--Saturday’s opponent, Kansas, for instance, played five games in that span--from the enervating Tulsa loss to tonight at Pauley Pavilion against Cal State Northridge.

What now?

Time for retooling the half-court offense and focusing on the positive intensity level of the Tulsa game, the Bruin players said, and time, in the wake of the last fateful fortnight, to shake off the strange emotions left over from the firing of Jim Harrick.

“We’ve been through a hard time, whether we’re consciously thinking about it or not,” junior Kris Johnson said. “In the back of our minds, maybe we’re still struggling. It was an emotional up and down, and you can’t forget about that.

“As much as we try to tell ourselves, ‘Oh, it’s not bothering us,’ it works on you a little bit.”

Johnson and others point to the high--probably too high--energy level they showed during the Tulsa game, when their short shots went wild, their passes bounced awry and their free-throw shooting was atrocious.

“One of the guys said it was like we were trying to play a whole season in one game,” Johnson said.

Still, down eight with about two minutes left, UCLA clawed back with frenetic defense to drag the game into overtime, in which it lost.

Was that the real beginning of the Lavin era?

“I told them that our season started with two minutes to go--what I saw there, the fire, drive and desire to get back into that game,” Lavin said last week. “There were breakdowns: Some of the turnovers led to baskets before we could get back, the free throws, the half-court offense.

“But the attitude, the heart, the competitiveness, the defense, the effort--those areas have to be a constant. Because no matter what kind of execution you have or how many free throws you make, if you don’t have the attitude, the heart, the competitive fire, all that other stuff doesn’t really matter.”

From there, Lavin said these two weeks of practice have given his staff and players a chance to reconfigure themselves as a team and to put some flow back into the haphazard half-court offense.

Pete Newell, the legendary former coach who watched the Tulsa game, said there are bright signs.

“First of all, let’s face it, how long has Steve had the team, a few days?” said Newell, who coached Lavin’s father, Cappy, at the University of San Francisco. “And I think as the dust is settling, you can see they played a real good team. We saw Tulsa beat Oklahoma State next, and they were up on a high.

“For anybody to judge Steve negatively on that, that’s wrong. I thought he did a good job on the bench. I watched to see, and he seemed to be composed, seemed to be in the game.”

In the days since the defeat, Lavin has been concentrating on crisper passing and execution in the half-court set.

But if last season’s team was also felled by sloppy half-court play, Lavin and his players say they believe this team is wiser and far superior to the previous edition, which also opened its season with a first-round tournament loss, to Santa Clara in the Maui Invitational.

“I’m not into moral victories, but I’m not as discouraged as I was last year against Santa Clara,” Johnson said. “It’s not as bad. At least we fought back, showed a little bit of heart.

“I think the main difference is defensive intensity. Of course, we’re going to go fast, we’re going to play kind of reckless at times.

“But from the Santa Clara game to the Tulsa game, I can’t believe anybody would say, ‘Oh, they’re the same squad. There’s nothing different about that team.’ ”

Johnson said the team knows that skeptics are waiting for the emotional, combustible team to start fraying at the edges. They lost a coach--will they lose their discipline?

“We’re smart,” Johnson said. “We’re one of the most intellectual teams in college basketball. We know what people are thinking. They’re waiting for us to fall on our faces because of this whole thing.

“We don’t want to play that story line out, though. We want to be the Steve Fisher, 1989 national championship team [of Michigan, which won the title with Fisher as an interim coach when Bill Frieder was not allowed to coach the team in the tournament]. That’s the team we want to be--not like Duke [in 1994-95] when Mike Krzyzewski got hurt and Pete Gaudet stepped in and they were 13-18. We don’t want to be that squad.”

Lavin is counting on that pride, plus the two weeks of practice time, to calm his team. With his staff just completed by the hiring of No. 3 assistant Steve Spencer, Lavin, who was a full-time assistant for only one year before this season--after four years as a part-time assistant--is the only coach not in his first season with the team.

“I think it’s important for them to become real familiar with my voice as a head coach, because before it was all a little scattered, with all the changes and all the circumstances surrounding me inheriting the team,” Lavin said.

“We didn’t get to have that real kind of sense of continuity for practice, and that’s important for a team’s chemistry.”