No Respect

You knew it was an amazing game.

But not until reading and listening to the accounts of UCLA’s upset of Cincinnati did you realize how amazing.

Not only had the eighth-seeded Bruins come back from a 13-point deficit and survived two overtimes to beat the top-seeded Bearcats in this spring’s first felling of an NCAA tournament giant.

But they apparently had done so without a coach.

The seniors took over. The freshmen grew up. The talent kicked in.

And Steve Lavin?

Well, um, er, hmm, ah, er, um....

After each of the Bruins’ mostly awful 11 losses this season, Steve Lavin was the target.

Yet after their biggest victory Sunday, he was a footnote?

C’mon people. Fair is fair.

If we’re going to rip him for not calling the right plays in losses, then we must commend him for empowering his players to improvise in victories.

If we’re going to say he’s too close to his players after losses, then we must congratulate him when that positive approach becomes a victory.

If we’re going to fire him after a midseason stinker to Arizona State ...

Then what now?

Shouldn’t we at least say that he’s doing, I don’t know, something right?

With five Sweet 16 appearances in his six years as coach, could we even say he’s doing something special?

“If you want to coach at a school where you receive a lot of adulation, UCLA is not the place,” Lavin said Monday with a chuckle.

But still ...

In the 27 years since John Wooden retired, no other UCLA coach has made it to the Sweet 16 in consecutive seasons.

In the current basketball environment, only Duke’s Coach Mike Krzyzewski can match the current five-for-six streak.

Notice I didn’t put Lavin’s name in the same sentence as that Duke guy’s. There’s only so much Lavin loathers can handle right now.

I understand. Nobody has ripped Lavin as much as I have. I even once spent an entire season burying him, with every column written about him containing the words, “But can he coach?”

That was the 1999-2000 season, when his team lost a dozen times.

Before, of course, stunning heavily favored Maryland by 35 points in a second-round tournament game.

Just as they had stunned Michigan two years earlier.

Just as the Bruins stunned Cincinnati on Sunday.

It’s no longer coincidence. It’s no longer luck. And in watching some of the country’s best players cower under the streaking Bruins in March, you can no longer say it’s simply talent.

Can Steve Lavin coach?

Perhaps not precisely in the way that UCLA fans have long defined coaching.

But certainly in a way that works today.

Maybe he doesn’t coach textbook strategy. But he certainly can give his players the confidence to find the answers themselves.

On Sunday, as in every other big tournament victory, his veterans owned crunch time. Dan Gadzuric, Matt Barnes and Jason Kapono simply wouldn’t let the Bruins

lose.

Does that come naturally? If it did, then Cincinnati’s veterans would have done the same thing. Yet they wilted under dictator Bob Huggins’ glare.

It is no coincidence that the only time in the last six years Lavin did not make the Sweet 16, he was bounced out in the first round with the youngest team in school history.

“You hope your players develop a leadership quality during the season, so in March, they can become an extension of the coaching staff on the floor,” Lavin said.

Maybe Lavin also isn’t the master of organization during timeouts. But his teams certainly get the message when it counts.

The Bruin victory Sunday was the ninth consecutive overtime win under Lavin. In Lavin-coached games in which they have been leading with five minutes remaining, they are 115-5.

“This time of year, the hay’s in the barn, you don’t need to make any dramatic changes,” Lavin said. “You are who you are.”

And, certainly, maybe his star players don’t always get better under him. But as Sunday’s game showed, some players do.

Billy Knight has clearly found himself under Lavin, much as Earl Watson did last season.

Dan Gadzuric might not have learned a lot of footwork, but he certainly runs and works harder than ever.

And at the beginning of the season, not even one of Lavin’s 45-minute postgame monologues could convince me that Cedric Bozeman--who didn’t really play the position even in high school--would ever be a point guard.

After Sunday, it now seems possible.

For all of his perceived shortcomings, Lavin annually reminds us that all things seem possible.

Does that make him another John Wooden, a sideline genius, a conventionally brilliant coach wielding brightly colored markers and a dark frown?

While traveling to San Jose this weekend to watch a team that could steal a national title, ask yourself another question.

Does it matter?

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.