LOS ANGELES - UCLA head coach Ben Howland recently spoke Pitt head coach Jamie Dixon, his good friend and former assistant, and it was brought up that last season Kentucky had a rotation of six players - occasionally seven - on their way to winning a national championship.
UCLA’s current rotation is also undermanned, using just eight players, but that’s where the comparisons of this year's UCLA team and last year’s Kentucky team end.
That team lost two games all season. The first loss came on a buzzer beater only after they won its first eight. After eight games this season, Howland’s Bruins are 5-3.
Anthony Davis played himself into being drafted No. 1 overall in the most recent NBA Draft, while Josh Smith ate himself off the Bruins roster.
And coming into this season, many believed Shabazz Muhammad could, like Davis, be taken No. 1 overall in next year’s draft. But after a turbulent start to his Bruins career, Muhammad is averaging just 16 points and the Bruins have lost three of his five games.
After assembling the top recruiting class in the country, this was supposed to be the class many thought would get Howland and UCLA back to the Final Four.
The embattled head coach still thinks this team can still be “very good.” However, they suffered a “bad loss” to Cal Poly and at this point in the season, appear to have more questions than answers.
“We know that Kentucky was great last year winning the national championship, but we’re no Kentucky,” said sophomore guard Norman Powell. “We don’t have Anthony Davis. We don’t have Michael Kidd-Gilchrist. We don’t have those types of players. With Shabazz and Kyle (Anderson), they’re great players, but Shabazz isn’t Anthony Davis.
"Nobody’s Anthony Davis.”
While Kentucky’s pieces were special, UCLA’s young talent is trying to figure out how special they can be collectively. Relying on freshmen so much is something Howland hasn’t done since his first year at UCLA.
This year’s group is still trying to learn the ropes, which has called for Howland to exercise a ton of patience.
“We have got to be patient and keep pushing hard,” Howland said. “A team with youth, you got to be patient. They’re learning. Everything is new to them. (There are) things that you take for granted sometimes that are just things that you would normally think that a freshman would know. You can’t take anything for granted.”
Tuesday’s exhibition game against Cal State San Marcos is going to allow the Bruins to work on things that have been problematic for them this season, primarily man-to-man defense. The exhibition game coming eight games into the season is an awkward scheduling quark that Howland says was done so that the first game inside the new Pauley Pavilion could be an official game.
The Bruins have played a lot of zone defense in recent games, including almost exclusively against Cal State Northridge, because of the issues they’ve had playing man-to-man defense and also out of necessity having just eight players in the rotation.
Offensively, the team has struggled with their transition offense. This season there has been more of a focus on pushing the tempo. However, if opportunities aren't there in transition, the team must then transform into their half-court offense. That process has been problematic at times.
In order to execute better, one of the biggest issues to overcome, aside from injuries and foul trouble, is conditioning.
“We’re just going to run more during practice,” Howland said. “Because we’re playing eight guys, we got to get ourselves in great condition for those eight guys to be able to play as hard as they need to play and be as effective as we need to be.
“We’re still, kind of, finding our way.”
