Barnes Is Given Pause; UCLA Is Not Refreshed

One minute, thirty-eight seconds.

Long enough to dry a sweat, cool a shot, lose a spark.

At the crumpled finish of another UCLA spring joyride Thursday, it was also long enough to end a season.

One minute, thirty-eight seconds.

In a West regional semifinal won by Missouri, 82-73, that was the difference.

Sound crazy?

What happened during that 1:38, now that was crazy.

That was the game-clock time that Matt Barnes sat on the bench midway through the second half after being inexplicably removed by Coach Steve Lavin amid the best individual stretch of any player in this tournament.

Long enough to slow the legs, distract the focus, kill the moment.

When Barnes was pulled, he had been involved in 15 of the Bruins’ previous 17 points in a run that gave them an eight-point lead.

He had scored 11. He had thrown two great passes that led to four more points. He had blocked a shot. He had gotten so excited, he bounced a ball off the leg of Missouri’s Justin Gage after the whistle and apologized.

He was brilliant.

Then, he was benched.

“For some reason,” said Missouri’s Kareem Rush, grinning and shrugging.

With 12:33 remaining in the game, Barnes departed, T.J. Cummings entered, and Clarence Gilbert was immediately fouled by Cummings on a layup that turned into a three-point play.

By the time Barnes was rushed back in with 10:55 remaining, the Tigers had closed the gap to four, but his absence wasn’t about Missouri.

It was about Barnes’ disappearing magic.

“After I came back, I never really got back into a rhythm,” he said.

His first shot after he returned was an airball. He missed three of his first four shots and committed a butter-fingered turnover. He scored only five points the rest of the game.

Remember that eight-point lead?

From the moment Barnes left until the time when he was the last Bruin to trudge to the locker room after the game, the Bruins were outscored by 16 points.

We weren’t the only ones to notice.

Said Rush, who scored 16 points in the second half: “Barnes had it going. When they took him out of the game, a scorer like that ... it fueled us to keep going.”

Said Rico Hines, the injured Bruin veteran watching from the bench: “I’m sure he needed a quick rest. But, yeah, when he left, the momentum just swung. Matt was on fire. He wasn’t going to let us lose.”

The Bruins’ most impressive 22-year-old physical specimen needed a rest?

Barnes had played 36 minutes Sunday in the second-round upset of Cincinnati. He had played at least 30 of a possible 40 minutes in seven of his last 10 starts.

And he’s a former football star.

“I didn’t really need a rest,” Barnes said. “But I could see where they wanted to put in somebody fresher than me.”

Lavin said he has been substituting like this for most of his six-year UCLA career. He said he likes to take his starters out in the middle of the half so they can have the added rest of a television timeout.

He said this sort of brief substitution helped the team win the double-overtime game against Cincinnati.

“Whether it was effective tonight or not, this is what I’ve done my whole career,” Lavin said.

This sort of Sweet 16 loss, however, was the worst of that career.

Although Lavin is now 1-4 in these games, with an average losing margin of 18 points, this was different than losing to eventual national champions like Kentucky or Duke.

This was a game they should have won, against a team they had trapped.

This was a game that could have opened a door to a suddenly, startlingly possible path to a national championship game.

To blow this sort of game on the same night that the nation’s No. 1 team and potential national semifinal opponent blew its game?

The ending here wasn’t as ugly as the Duke loss.

But for Bruin fans, it was just as exasperating.

After two postseason wins that seemed to extricate Lavin from the clutches of his critics for at least a couple of more seasons, the hounds will be barking again.

To make it worse, he followed the Barnes benching with another strange substitution with 46 seconds left in the game, Missouri’s Clarence Gilbert at the line and the Tigers still leading by a reachable seven points.

He took out Barnes, Jason Kapono, Dan Gadzuric and Billy Knight, replacing them with young reserves.

A little early for that, no? Haven’t bigger margins been cut in less time?

“That was the passing of the baton,” Lavin said. “We wanted to allow our future to be on the floor as we passed the baton to next year.”

As Thursday proved again, it is a future that will not be any calmer than the past.

It is a future that could make 1:38 seem like forever.

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