UCLA Has Already Run Out of Margin for Error

By default and with two months of dramatic mayhem behind them, the Bruins have discovered a new, revelatory, tense, absurd basketball reality in this strange season:

Every game counts.

And every play and every roar and every shaky silence and every teeny-tiny part of UCLA vs. everybody else.

Of course, the traditional Bruin tightrope walk comes in March--the held breaths, the nervous sounds, the final denouement.

Not this season, for a thousand reasons.

It’s already nervous time: With the longtime coach fired, with logical comparisons to the me-first Tracy Murray-Don MacLean era flying, with ugly performances piling up before January, with the Pacific 10 Conference appearing to be much stronger than last season, what happens in the next month or so probably is more important than what happens this March.

How can you wait for the first round of the tournament when UCLA might not even get there?

It’s Judgment January: This is about eight players and four coaches figuring out things for themselves. Or failing.

The future of the program? The next coach? The NBA? Those are merely parlor guessing games, to be settled by what happens on the floor, UCLA vs. everybody else, and the whole thing could either shatter or be saved in the blink of an eye.

The players sensed the early emergency themselves after their 79-63 loss to Illinois last Saturday, calling a team meeting to try to stop the season from going up in flames, and UCLA won its next game, at St. Louis.

Interim Coach Steve Lavin has sensed it from the beginning of his fitful term, imploring the Bruins to grow up and stay focused on the battle of the moment.

“I’ve told the guys, we’re going half to half, minute to minute,” Lavin said. “If the five guys who start don’t play well, after five minutes we’ll mix up the lineup and try something else. I don’t care if I have to play walk-ons, I’m going to find guys who want to compete out there.”

Already, in seven games, the Bruin identity has taken on several tones, and there are guaranteed to be many more twists and turns in the next few weeks:

--Junior achievement: Toby Bailey, J.R. Henderson and Kris Johnson have become the three most essential players on this team, and, for better or worse, seniors Charles O’Bannon and Cameron Dollar and sophomore Jelani McCoy are receding into supporting roles.

Johnson is in the starting lineup now, with Dollar coming off the bench as an inspirational and defensive leader (but definitely not a scoring threat), and with Johnson and Henderson working on the low post, O’Bannon is far from the first option.

There may not be three players who turn the ball over more, but these three juniors are the only Bruins who can change the course of a game--Bailey has been UCLA’s best all-around player and the only one who can beat defenders with the dribble; Henderson is the team’s pressure ball-handler and hardest matchup inside; and Johnson is the purest scorer on the squad.

Last season, these three led UCLA to the the Pac-10 title, but never really adapted to Coach Jim Harrick’s pleas for teamwork. And it’s showing this season, even as Bailey and Henderson weigh their NBA draft status. The coaching staff has already brought up the comparison to the Murray-MacLean team.

--Comfort zone: Harrick was a man-to-man coach, UCLA has been a man-to-man program, and Lavin is a man-to-man guru. Players are usually more aggressive and fiery in a man-to-man defense, Lavin has always felt. But starting with the second half of the Illinois game, the Bruins are a zone team.

Why? Because they have to be. It helps them on the defensive boards because their big men have a tendency to stray from the basket in man defense and get locked in low in zone. Plus, the Bruin bench is thin and the zone saves legs, and they’re so tall and athletic, they can make a zone very imposing to shoot over.

“If we just stand there with our arms out, we can practically cover the whole court,” Johnson said.

--Baron or barren? You have to figure if this all deteriorates into a finger-pointing, pouting mess (remember the Murray-MacLean seasons?), Santa Monica Crossroads senior point guard Baron Davis might venture elsewhere for college, and then the UCLA program is really in trouble.

Previous Southern California recruits, remember, saw UCLA’s ego-filled teams of the early to mid-’80s and took off to Duke or other saner spots.

Kansas is apparently Davis’ other top choice, and you cannot have more of a contrast than UCLA’s struggles and the Jayhawks’ brilliance this season.

The recruitment of Davis, suddenly, has become the most important (and controversial) UCLA pursuit perhaps since MacLean, and if he comes, Davis could be UCLA’s most significant freshman in a long, long time.

Isn’t all this fun?

“I think everyone’s expecting them to show tension and to show stress and maybe if you look for those things all the time you’ll find them,” St. Louis Coach Charlie Spoonhour said.

“The best thing for the fans to do is look at it as a blank page and let them paint the picture and see how it comes out.”

VIEW FROM MALIBU

Jelani Gardner and omm’A Givens practice every day with the Pepperdine Waves, but, in their transfer redshirt seasons, they still have plenty of time to watch what’s happening at their former schools.

Gardner says he figured California would be good--maybe not 7-2 good--even after losing conference player of the year Shareef Abdur-Rahim to the NBA, Coach Todd Bozeman to the firing line, and himself and Tremaine Fowlkes to transfer.

With new Coach Ben Braun, imported from Eastern Michigan, Cal is a new team: playing fierce defense, organized offense and with a consistent substitution pattern.

“When I was there, we had a team with so much talent and so much ability, everybody was trying to go to the NBA, everybody had been told that it was going to be their show, and it couldn’t work out that way,” Gardner said.

“With us leaving--myself, Tremaine and Shareef--that gives them that ability to play with comfort, where they don’t have to look over their shoulder and they can just enjoy playing.”

Gardner compares last season’s Cal team to this year at UCLA.

“Since Ed O’Bannon left, I haven’t really seen the cohesiveness as a team that they had back then,” Gardner said. “Sometimes you have to take a step down and let somebody else play the big role and you wait your turn.”

For Givens, the heralded player who never could get major minutes in Westwood, it’s a relief to be away.

“Every day, man, yeah, every day I think about how I’m glad to not be going through that,” Givens said. “Even though I do see myself playing a lot there [if he had stayed], I’m glad I got out of that situation.

“Already over here, the coaches have confidence in me. I feel if Harrick had only the same confidence, I would’ve done much better. I’ve made a lot of strides here and I can only see good things in the future, really.”

NEW TIME AT PEPPERDINE

Things haven’t started too well, but watch a practice at Pepperdine and you know first-year Coach Lorenzo Romar, the former UCLA assistant, has got something going.

Last season’s leading scorer, guard Gerald Brown, hurt his knee in March and is redshirting, so with Gardner and Givens, he provides the Waves (1-8) with one of the best scout teams in America.

Junior forward Bryan Hill, Pepperdine’s leading scorer this season, said the team can’t allow itself to think about how good it can be next year.

“That’s where problems come, when you start looking into the future,” Hill said. “We still have 20-something-odd games to play now. I mean, we don’t want to just throw these games away so we can get to next season. We’re trying to make it to the tournament this year and keep building on it for the years to come.”

Said Gardner: “This team could be incredible next year. We’ve got tons of talent, and Bryan Hill is definitely a big-time player. The thing about it, we’re all pretty much older than most teams. Me and omm’A are supposed to be seniors, Gerald has a year back, he was supposed to graduate.

“So, I think if we come in and focus on what we need to do and put all the distractions to the side, I think we can do something special.”

RANDOM NOTES

Does it seem as if the Big East is being ignored this season? There’s good reason. After losing Ray Allen, Allen Iverson and John Wallace to the NBA, and still stuck with Felipe Lopez, Big East teams are 0-10 against ranked nonconference opponents, losing by an average of 20 points, and only Villanova looks like a contender to go far in March. . . . Yes, that’s Ryan “Moose” Bailey starting as a freshman point guard for Penn State, with the Bailey trademark flying elbow on his jump shot. Toby’s younger brother originally committed to USC, but was allowed out of it when the Trojans fired Charlie Parker and replaced him with Henry Bibby.

Arizona State took a major hit Saturday when swingman Quincy Brewer, maybe Coach Bill Frieder’s most important player, tore a ligament in his thumb. Brewer will sit out the rest of the season, and an already-thin Sun Devil team got thinner. . . . Arizona junior guard Miles Simon’s season is in jeopardy too. Simon, who hasn’t played this season because of academic problems, apparently won’t be available at least until Jan. 11 and, if he doesn’t pass a make-up course, he could be out for the season. . . . Though Kansas and Kentucky still look dominant, St. Louis’ Spoonhour is keeping his eye on Cincinnati, the preseason No. 1 team and the Billikens’ Conference USA rival. “Knowing Bob [Huggins] as I do, we’ll see the best of Cincinnati in February,” Spoonhour said, noting that the Bearcat coach is mixing in several new players and has recently had several weeks of practice time without a busy game schedule. “Bobby’s such a competitive person, and in [Danny] Fortson he’s got a wonderful offensive player. If he can get somebody’s role figured out at the point, they can be very good.”