Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

Lights, camera ... fracture.

Those child stars known as the UCLA basketball team made their debut under the postseason hot lamps Thursday amid giddy reviews and great expectations.

You know how there’s a first time for everything?

That apparently includes embarrassment.

It was Oregon State 79, Bruins melted.

It was the beginning of the magic becoming the end of the illusion.

As Pacific 10 Conference tournament openers go, it was a collapse on a swatch of red shag.

As a preamble to the Big Dance, it was the equivalent of two corns and a blister.

For those insisting on such details, OK, the Bruins scored 72 points and lost by seven. But it felt as if they had scored a handful, and lost by dozens, and in the end, amid thousands of seats of silence, they trudged off the Staples Center court slower than Shaq or Jack.

“It was disheartening,” guard Arron Afflalo said in a rare moment of youthful understatement.

Their best shot was a half-court swish, which would have been great, except the shooter was 29 and wearing a Bruin baseball cap and winning a car.

Their best defense was a guy in the stands who, when Oregon State had the ball, would blow a whistle.

Their best news was that the building felt emptier than the last minutes of, well, er, a Laker game.

Maybe the NCAA didn’t see this?

Come Sunday, the Bruins should still get a tournament bid. To ignore their 30-something RPI and the difficulty of the Pac-10 -- some have it rated the second-toughest conference this season -- would be the usual East Coast bias at its worst.

But after Thursday, their seeding deserves to be so low, the committee shouldn’t so much announce it as plant it.

“Yeah, I’m disappointed,” Coach Ben Howland said. “This is a time we all need to look inside. I’m doing that and saying, ‘I didn’t do a good enough job preparing them to win this game.’ ”

He’s right, and he’s wrong.

He’s wrong that it’s all his fault. He’s right that the Bruins need to look inside -- look inside their wallets at their driver’s licenses, assuming some of them are old enough for one.

This was not as much about basketball as birthdays.

The kids just weren’t ready for this.

They were wide-eyed and wild-shooting and weird-passing and just plain wacky.

Although the Bruins’ best player is a senior, and its two big men are juniors, the pulse lies with the three freshman starters, and on Thursday, that pulse raced.

Protested Howland: “Our freshmen have played so many minutes, I don’t look at that.”

Grumbled Afflalo: “Being too young, that’s just an excuse.”

Well, guys, there are good excuses, and bad excuses, and this one works.

The Bruins first 11 possessions of this midafternoon game were filled with drive-time messes: a missed layup, two shots blocked, a bad pass, and consecutive offensive fouls.

They trailed by 10 points before some of their fans had even ditched work.

They trailed by 20 points before Howland even had a chance to turn red.

Farmar would throw a no-look pass to a not-looking baseline photographer. Josh Shipp would endure a first half without taking a shot. Afflalo would take four first-half shots but miss all of them.

Dijon Thompson is a tad cooler, but even he had twice as many turnovers as assists.

And, yes, Michael Fey and Ryan Hollins had been here before, but they weren’t much help against an Oregon State team that filled the lane with such intensity, you would have thought they had been waiting 15 years for this.

Actually, they had, this being their best team during that time, thanks to a third-year coach who poked at every Bruin weakness, meaning he furiously jabbed at the middle.

If Jay John keeps scheming this way, one day we may even stop transposing his name.

“They played with more intensity, more passion,” Jordan Farmar said.

That was the most stunning part of the afternoon, because this Howland team has never lacked either.

But even after they clipped a 22-point margin to four with about nine minutes left, the Bruins couldn’t keep their heads.

A wild Farmar three-point attempt. A bad Brian Morrison pass. Two missed three-pointers. A bad Farmar pass. The Beavers led by 11.

“We’re going to learn from today,” Howland vowed.

And more than one lesson, perhaps.

“Maybe we’ve been riding a little high,” Afflalo said. “Maybe this puts things in perspective for us, lets us know that it won’t come easy.”

Or even this soon.

Last week, this space proclaimed that these Bruins could win two games in the NCAA tournament.

Turns out, as far as the Sweet 16 goes, maybe these kids need to turn it before they join it.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.