Ben Howland's core group of players are a bunch of gym rats, the coach claims. It's not a concern because all coaches believe it's a good problem to have.
When it becomes a burden, is when those players don't take advantage of off days, like they were given on Wednesday.
"It negates things if you come in here and shoot from 10 o'clock (at) night until one in the morning, which they've been known to do –come in here and they just want to shoot for hour upon hour at night," Howland said.
With that in mind, UCLA's freshmen, Jordan Adams, Kyle Anderson, Shabazz Muhammad, and Tony Parker vowed to only get up about 45 minutes worth of shots Wednesday night. Adams even said he would get a massage.
Whether they stuck to their word or not is unknown. What is clear is that Muhammad returned to practice on Thursday after missing Tuesday's session with pink eye, the school announced.
The Bruins are in the midst of an eight-day layoff in between games as they prepare for Sunday afternoon's visit to USC at 12:30pm on FOX Sports West.
The last time the Bruins encountered such a layoff, they beat each other up with plenty of intense, physical practices. This time around, Howland is taking a different approach. He's going back to the basics.
The Bruins spent Monday and Tuesday doing a lot of skill work –reading and setting screens along with making correct passes.
It coincides with Howland's new approach to simplify the playbook. The team had just nine sets at their disposal last Saturday at Stanford. With that being done, a lot of emphasis is focused on the execution –taking those nine sets and executing them perfectly. With eight days off, they can really get into the details in hopes of becoming more efficient on the offensive end of the floor.
"When we don't have something in transition we got to do a better job of simplifying what we do, doing less things, and doing them well and then reading how they're playing us," Howland said. "It's all sorts of little things that are the details that matter so much that, sometimes, because we're preparing for the next game and games just keep coming at you, you don't get a chance to do that much. This was great."
All of the skill work and small details has since been shifted to higher intensity practices with their return to the hardwood on Thursday.
As they prepare for the Trojans, the scar remains from the four-point, overtime upset handed to them by USC last month.
"It's depressing," Howland said of this season's loss to USC. "They were very good. We were very poor."
For the young Bruins the intensity of the rivalry was lost on them heading into the rivalry game for the first time. That's since changed.
"To lose to them, I really got the hang of the rivalry," Anderson said. "The other team, how excited they looked when they beat us how they did all that extra stuff on the middle of our court. I'm sold on it now. I'm looking to go do the same things."
Does that mean Anderson will celebrate in the middle of Galen Center if the UCLA wins on Sunday in the same fashion the Trojans did in their first trip to new Pauley Pavilion?
"Absolutely," he said. "Absolutely."
