LOS ANGELES –With five games left and a young team under his watch, UCLA head coach Ben Howland has decided less is more.
Howland has been scrutinized plenty during his time with the Bruins. The majority of the scrutiny he receives revolves around his rampant use and the sometimes bizarre timing of his timeouts, as well as his wide range of offensive sets.
He continues to use his timeouts freely — after all they don’t carry over to the next game — but he’s cut back on the playcalling.
“(When) we went into the game Saturday, I told them these are the nine things we’re going to run,” Howland said. “That’s it. So let’s execute what it is that we do and really execute those nine simple things well.”
In doing so, the Bruins had less than half of their offensive sets at their disposal against Stanford and far less than Howland has carried into a game in the past.
“In years past we’ve had as many as 45 different sets that we could’ve gone to in a given game,” Howland said.
Why the sudden change?
“We’re young and we’re working on execution,” Howland said.
It’s a stark contrast from the Howland this city’s been accustomed to and more of an NBA approach to running plays – if it’s working, stick with it.
The players enjoy that a lot better.
“It just keeps it simpler, keeps your mind off having to run stuff, and just keeps your mind on the court,” Travis Wear said. “I think as a player you just want to keep running something that’s working. Sometimes if we go away from something that we see is working it might be like ‘OK, let’s just go back to it.’
Howland believes simplifying things on Saturday not only helped the Bruins offensively but helped their defense as well. The Bruins shot 54 percent from the field against Stanford. They held the Cardinal to just 38 percent shooting. It was the first time in five games they held an opponent under 40 percent.
“They work in unison,” Howland said. “When you’re good offensively it helps your defense. When you’re good defensively it helps your offense and the flipside is true.”
In a way it gave a team some life that entered the game in Palo Alto shooting 38 percent or less in four of their previous five games. Before that rough stretch, the Bruins had only shot less than 40 percent in a game one time this season.
The Bruins took the less is more approach and ran with it.
