Keefe to sit out season

James Keefe returned to practice last week with high hopes that his surgically repaired left shoulder was ready for pounding and that he would step easily back into the swing of UCLA basketball.

On Wednesday, it was announced that the 6-foot-8, 228-pound sophomore had decided to sit out this season as a redshirt, keeping three years of eligibility.

Coach Ben Howland said that after a discussion with Keefe and his father, James, it was decided that the former high school All-American from Santa Margarita High would concentrate on the rehabilitation of his shoulder and gaining strength.

Keefe had dazzled coaches and teammates with his increased physicality and emerging confidence during summer workouts, but Howland said the decision is firm unless another front-court player were to suffer a season-ending injury between now and Jan. 12. Later than that and Howland said it wouldn’t be fair to Keefe to ask him to come back.

“At the end of last season James was lifting really hard and was up to about 228 pounds,” Howland said. “Now he’s around 220 and it’s a question of whose minutes would he take this year coming in late.”

Keefe said he and his father talked about this possibility as early as August when Keefe had the surgery.

“The decision to come back or not always was to see how my progress was,” Keefe said. “I feel pretty good in practice, but we’re obviously real deep this year in that position. Those guys are nine games in. It’s about limited minutes this year versus playing significant minutes in the next coming years.”

His fight for minutes would have been with Josh Shipp, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, Alfred Aboya, Kevin Love and Lorenzo Mata-Real.

Mata-Real is a senior and there is the possibility that Love, Shipp and/or Mbah a Moute might leave early for the NBA draft. The Bruins have a four-man recruiting class coming in next fall, but only 6-9 Drew Gordon is an inside player. The others are guards Jrue Holiday, Jerime Anderson and Malcolm Lee.

“We have a lot of older big men this year,” Keefe said, “so there are spots for me in the future to play big minutes with good guards. It’s not like we won’t have a great team in the next couple of years.”

Howland said Keefe was playing well enough in July that “I thought he would push people for a lot of playing time.

“Right now James is ahead of Nikola Dragovic and Chace Stanback but behind eight other guys, and if someone gets hurt, say, Feb. 1, I’m not going to say, ‘James, come off your redshirt.’ Before Jan. 12, though, we’d still have 14 league games to play.”

Keefe averaged 1.0 point and 1.6 rebounds last season though he had six rebounds in the NCAA semifinal loss to Florida and four rebounds and nine points in UCLA’s first-round NCAA win over Weber State.

Sophomore walk-on point guard Mustafa Abdul-Hamid is sidelined because of a stress reaction in his right foot, according to Howland. Howland said that means Russell Westbrook plays the point against Darren Collison in practice, though Westbrook takes the shooting guard spot at the start of games.

diane.pucin@latimes.com