Bearcats Must Solve the Puzzling Bruins

This is so confusing for Cincinnati coaches and players.

They watched UCLA demolish Mississippi in a breathless display of two-platoon, take-no-prisoners basketball Friday night. They saw coltish freshmen with long arms come off the bench to replace lanky juniors and seniors with long arms. They saw 10 talented players, two full teams of guys who could run and jump and shoot and hustle and make plays.

So Saturday morning Dan Peters, Cincinnati associate head coach, stopped Cal Coach Ben Braun and asked a question.

“I said to Ben, ‘Does anybody in the Pac-10 have more talent than UCLA?’”

UCLA fans can guess the answer.

“He told me,” Peters said, “not from 1 through 10. I know this: UCLA is one of the top two or three most talented teams we’ve seen in a few years.”

Here’s the confusing part.

“What,” Peters said, “are these guys doing as No. 8 seeds?”

What, indeed?

Peters talked about watching tape of UCLA’s victory over Kansas. “I mean, geez, they had a lineup on the court where no one was shorter than 6-7 and then you see those long arms. And they’re skilled. These guys, they can win a national championship. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

For a team that seemed to treat the regular season as something to spit out, as if it were a bad apple, eighth-seeded UCLA has done all right by the NCAA draw.

A first game against a short, poor-shooting Rebel team that pretty much couldn’t win outside Oxford, Miss., was just the right kind of practice game. The Bruins found out, yes, it still works, being a talented UCLA team in the NCAA tournament.

And now they come up against a No. 1 seed--but one with flaws.

The Bearcats are the anti-Bruins. They take every possession of every game seriously. Their coach, Bob Huggins, considers himself lucky to not be working in a steel mill or factory on the night shift. He does not get many high school all-Americans. He is a screamer, a shouter, a man not afraid to pull a player by the jersey and exchange spit as well as words. He wants things done right all the time.

“If our team wins by 20 and we should have won by 30,” Huggins says, “I’m not happy.”

The Bearcats will play hard for 40 minutes. They will play aggressively, on defense and offense. But are they good enough, 31-3 record aside? That’s not a sure thing.

Cincinnati has played only one team in the RPI top 10 (Mississippi State) and was 4-2 in its six games against top-30 RPI teams (including Marquette three times, Oklahoma State and Xavier). Cincinnati played the 23rd-hardest schedule; UCLA the 11th. Cincinnati played in Conference USA, ranked ninth-toughest, while UCLA was in the fifth-rated Pac-10.

Which was why the Bearcats were impressed by UCLA’s 80-58 victory over Mississippi. Which was why the Bearcats were confused. “They lost 11 games, man,” Cincinnati guard Steve Logan said. “How?”

UCLA can beat Cincinnati. UCLA, with all its height and all those long arms, can play a stifling zone defense. The Bearcats, except for Logan, aren’t great standstill shooters. It can be enervating, shooting over those long arms, and if the Bruins don’t turn the ball over, don’t let Cincinnati get to running and shooting on the move, in rhythm, the Bruins can win.

You can make a lot out of the physical matchups and the 10-deep UCLA rotation and you can imagine many ways UCLA can upset Cincinnati.

Today’s game is about will.

Will the Bruins come out fearless and full of themselves and keep playing, past the mistakes and missed shots and lost rebounds; will they keep running hard and defending harder? Will they give the Ole Miss effort or the Arizona State at Pauley effort?

Billy Knight was sympathizing with Cincinnati’s coaches. How, Knight wonders, do you prepare for the Bruins? “How do you scout us?” Knight asked. “On Friday our leading scorers struggled and we still won by 20 and a freshman was our second-leading scorer. It’s tough to defend a team like that. It’ll be interesting to see how they guard us.”

This was an interesting analysis. The Bruins understand how, at this time of the year when the opponents don’t know them so well, when the opponents haven’t played the bad Bruins, their split personality can be an asset.

“We’re going with the flow,” senior Rico Hines said, “and we’re just playing basketball. It’s like it’s an AAU tournament or something. Just play basketball and move on.”

What you notice about the NCAA tournament is that the underachievers sometimes have an advantage over the overachievers. Missouri upsetting Ohio State is an example. Sometimes, if your team has the talent and the talent decides it’s worth getting motivated, the talent wins.

It was not an accident that Cincinnati was mostly unranked in preseason polls and UCLA was mostly in the top five. Huggins is a tough, driven, well-prepared coach. But as Knight says, how to you prepare for UCLA?

That two-platoon thing, five-man, full-team substitutions that worked so well against Mississippi? The Bruins did that one other time this year, on Senior Day at Pauley. And it worked.

Then the Pac-10 tournament came and Steve Lavin didn’t use his innovation. Why? Who knows. Maybe he forgot. “But I’m determined to use it all during the NCAA tournament,” the coach says.

And here’s the thing. There’s not a team in the country that could do the same thing. None with 10 players of such talent. So as hard and as well as the Bearcats play, it might not matter.

Whatever happens today will be up to UCLA. That’s how it has been most of this season. The great wins, the bad losses, they’ve all come because of how UCLA played. It’s not often a No. 8 seed can determine its fate. But this one can.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.