Cincinnati Was Behind the Eight-Ball

They are the best eighth-seeded team in the history of the NCAA tournament, the best 11-loss team, maybe the best team left. Really.

They are your UCLA Bruins and you love them, you hate them, you love them again and they’re on their way to San Jose, so deal with it.

There were so many plays, so many players doing so many glorious things with a basketball. There were great athletes improvising, changing their body positions in midair, turning passes into shots and shots into passes, jumping, climbing to the sky, to the ball, to the Sweet 16, to a sweet week, a sweet season, a sweet reward.

UCLA, seeded eighth in the NCAA West Regional, and Cincinnati, seeded No. 1, were playing two overtimes, 50 minutes, of frantic, frenzied basketball at Mellon Arena.

It is what happens when a tremendously talented team dithers and dallies during the regular season, loses 11 games, slinks into the tournament on a two-game losing streak and forces the selection committee to drop them low in the draw.

You get a Final Four game in the round of 32. You get Cincinnati, a team with a 31-3 record, walking off the court as losers in an upset, yet not ashamed because, really, the better team won. If the Bearcats and the Bruins played 10 times, the Bruins would win seven or eight.

“They are,” Cincinnati Coach Bob Huggins said, “as talented an eight seed ever in the history of the NCAA tournament and they got us today.”

Yes they are and yes they did. Villanova won the 1985 title as a No. 8, but those Wildcats didn’t have half the talent of UCLA.

And they might very well be the best team left. Maryland looks tough and Oklahoma was impressive Sunday in beating Xavier, but who else? Duke barely goes four deep. UCLA goes 10. Arizona? Beat ‘em. Kansas? Beat the Jayhawks too.

Here’s the team that can’t lose in the second round of this tournament but can’t beat Ball State in the second round of the Maui Invitational. Sometimes the Bruins are fearless, sometimes they are frightful.

Is there any team in the country as talented, one through 10, as UCLA, Huggins was asked? “If the truth were known,” Huggins said, “those other two guys, the ones who didn’t play [John Hoffart and Josiah Johnson, the 11th and 12th Bruins], you could probably count them too. They are very talented, very skilled. I mean their power forward [Matt Barnes] had 17 points and 11 assists. That hasn’t happened since Magic [Johnson], has it?”

There was one play, one crazy, unexplainable play full of bad planning and desperate scrambling that sums up this season’s UCLA team.

The Bruins, having built a 94-90 lead in the second overtime, had just given up a three-point play to Cincinnati’s Leonard Stokes. Freshman point guard Cedric Bozeman, who seemed to have figured out what it takes to be a big-time college point guard, slipped and hurt his ankle on the next play.

After a Cincinnati miss and UCLA still leading, 94-93, backup point guard Ryan Walcott dribbled aimlessly, the Bruins stood around nonchalantly and waited for 34 seconds to tick off the 35-second shot clock.

Then Barnes heaved a wobbly, desperate three-point prayer that was lucky to draw iron. Dan Gadzuric stretched and jumped and stretched some more and just managed to keep alive the rebound so that it landed in the hands of senior guard Billy Knight. In one motion, Knight scooped the ball into the basket. And was fouled. And made the free throw. With 1:27 left.

Everything you hate about UCLA happened on that play. No plan, no order, no sense of urgency, no concept of time or space. And everything you love too. The cockeyed recovery, the scrambling improvisation.

“What can you do?” Cincinnati’s star guard Steve Logan said. “They’ve got lots of quick guys with long arms and they keep coming at you. I don’t think we’d get away with playing like that, but it works for them. That’s the toughest No. 8 seed I’ve ever seen. What can you do?”

That’s both the beauty and the baffling annoyance of this UCLA team. What can you do? Can you hate them when they are so good, when Barnes can make pinpoint passes to Gadzuric for alley-oop dunks, when Bozeman can penetrate and make bank shots, when freshman Dijon Thompson comes into the game in overtime and floats through the lane launching high, looping, wispy jump shots that seem to flutter in the breeze and fall silently through the net?

Can you love them when they let Bearcat forwards jump over two and three of them for offensive rebound after offensive rebound, letting Cincinnati take two, three, four, five shots a possession, when they let a Cincinnati guard, not Logan but Leonard Stokes, keep shooting uncontested jump shots until he has scored 18 points in the first half and looks as surprised as anyone?

“Resiliency is the most important thing you can teach young people,” Lavin said, “because in life you fall down a lot and you have to bounce back.”

It almost sounds as if all this is planned, as if Lavin has concocted a blueprint that leaves his players on their own to learn or not, to win or lose and get knocked down on purpose so that they have to get back up. Is this possible?

And now the Bruins--the older ones such as Barnes, Gadzuric, Knight and Kapono, and even the young ones, Bozeman and Thompson, T.J. Cummings, Andre Patterson, Walcott--will always get back up because they are so used to falling down.

At the end of regulation, after UCLA had the ball for 31 seconds and had Bozeman drive, finally, to the basket only to have his shot blocked out of bounds, there were 3.4 seconds left and the ball remained with the Bruins. On some teams, the coach would gather his players and diagram the play. On this team, the players ran yelling toward the bench and holding up fingers, one or two. They were telling the coach what to call. There was a timeout. Lavin drew up a play. Barnes shot an airball three-pointer, having to arc it over a Bearcat forward.

So what? The Bruins just bounced back resiliently and kept playing. On to the Sweet 16.

*

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