A real spine-tingler

UCLA point guard Darren Collison came alive Saturday.

Off the dribble, shooting over the long arms of 7-foot defenders Brook and Robin Lopez, making hanging floaters in the lane, banking in shots while driving toward the baseline, all of it came naturally to Collison.

With starting forward Luc Richard Mbah a Moute on the bench because of a sprained left ankle and with starting center Kevin Love suddenly bent over with back pain in the first minute of Saturday’s Pacific 10 Conference tournament championship game at Staples Center, it was Collison who led third-ranked UCLA to a 67-64 victory over 11th-ranked Stanford.

Collison’s 28 creative points seemed to destroy the Cardinal’s will, each teardrop jumper, each drive through the lane.

It was UCLA’s third conference tournament title and it came nine days after the top-seeded Bruins (31-3) had clinched the regular-season championship over runner-up Stanford (26-7).

“I thought this was Darren’s best performance of the season,” Love said. “He attacked both 7-footers, got to the free-throw line, knocked shots down, just put the whole team on his back and took us to the promised land today.”

Love’s own back was barely able to carry his body. On one of the first plays of the game, the conference player of the year felt an uncomfortable tug as he extended for a rebound.

Four times Love came to the bench, his face scrunched in pain. Finally, after missing two free throws and being pulled, Love yelled at UCLA Coach Ben Howland, “I’m fine. Don’t take me out.”

And ultimately Love played 32 minutes, though his totals of 12 points and six rebounds were well below his season averages of 17.3 points and 10.8 rebounds.

“I tried to explode to the basket and my back kind of pulled,” Love said. “At first it felt like a cramp and I tried to play through it a couple more times. After that it just kept tugging.”

Love said he was wincing so much because he had never had a back problem. “I finally told Coach he didn’t need to take me out just because I’m grimacing. So I just had to bite my bottom lip so maybe Coach Howland would keep me in the game if I didn’t make any of those faces.”

The Bruins started short-handed because Mbah a Moute, the team’s second-leading rebounder, had sprained his left ankle in Friday’s win over USC. Mbah a Moute had rolled the same ankle against Arizona on Feb. 2, an injury that caused him to sit out two games and nearly two weeks of practice. He said this sprain has been less painful and that he hoped to be available when UCLA plays its first NCAA tournament game.

And with a resolute Collison scoring the first basket Sunday on a baseline jumper, the Bruins set out to earn for certain an NCAA tournament No. 1 seeding, something they didn’t have in their trips to the Final Four the previous two years.

Besides Collison’s 28 points, guard Russell Westbrook had a career-high 11 rebounds and backup forward James Keefe had a career-high eight points. It could have been 10, but Keefe missed two free throws with 19 seconds left.

The first was too hard; the second was an air ball. The misses left UCLA ahead, 65-62, and set up the final frantic seconds of relentless defense by the Bruins and curious offense by Stanford.

The Cardinal took 16 of the last 19 seconds to pass around the perimeter before Lawrence Hill accepted an open path to a dunk with 3.1 seconds left.

“We were trying to get penetration for a two,” Stanford Coach Trent Johnson said. “We didn’t want to take a three because there was time on the clock.”

But after Hill’s shot, the Cardinal was still down by a point and was forced to foul Collison, an 89% free-throw shooter. Collison, the tournament’s most valuable player, made both with 2.9 seconds left and Anthony Goods’ halfcourt shot hit the front of the rim at the buzzer.

Brook Lopez, who led Stanford with 15 points, looked at numbers that showed UCLA had a 21-5 edge in offensive rebounds, a 43-35 total rebounding advantage, and that the Bruins took 71 shots to only 48 for Stanford. Lopez shrugged his shoulders and said, “They wanted it more.”

Howland also gave credit to his team’s toughness. The Bruins made only nine of 23 free throws and missed 44 field-goal attempts.

“We had a real inspired team effort today,” Howland said. “It shows you these kids know how to find a way, and the way today was to get 21 offensive rebounds. Russell and Darren played 40 minutes, Josh [Shipp] played 37 and 39 last night. That’s a lot of minutes and they really delivered.”

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diane.pucin@latimes.com