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Alexander: UCLA’s championship hopes go broke in ‘Vegas

March 24, 2023

LAS VEGAS — Mick Cronin is a big fan of this city. It just hasn’t been very good to his team.

Then again, that happens to a lot of people here.

And it didn’t change for Cronin and the Bruins on Thursday night, when a scoring drought that took up much of the second half cost them the lead and ultimately the game. The Bruins went 11:20 without a field goal in the second half to enable Gonzaga to roar back, and a rally of their own in the final minutes fell short, in a 79-76 loss that put Gonzaga into the Elite Eight and sent UCLA home with a 31-6 record.

The ending – after UCLA had let a 13-point lead get away and then Gonzaga had squandered a 10-point edge with 2:38 to play – was pure insanity. Maybe it wasn’t quite as crazy as the Jalen Suggs logo shot that eliminated the Bruins in the Final Four two years ago, but it wasn’t that far off: A 3-pointer from just inside the logo by Julian Strawther – a ’Vegas guy, no less – with 7.2 seconds left on what apparently was a busted defensive coverage, after Amari Bailey’s own 3-pointer from the left wing had put UCLA ahead 76-75 with 12.2 seconds to play.

The whole process was enough to inspire separate nervous breakdowns for each of the 18,544 patrons in T-Mobile Arena. But in the end it was the offensive drought that did the Bruins in. They were 0 for 11 from the field before a Jaime Jaquez Jr. and-one with 1:14 left cut Gonzaga’s lead to 72-65. UCLA was outscored 20-3 during that 11:20 stretch and 30-8 in going from a 59-52 lead to a 72-62 deficit, and the Bruins looked stagnant offensively on way too many possessions.

“I’d say we ran some really good sets to go at what we thought we could take advantage of, and we got some really good looks,” point guard Tyger Campbell said. “And we just weren’t able to knock ’em in. So I would say that our drought was due to us taking good shots and us not making them, that’s what I would say.”

Or, as Cronin put it:

“Wide-open shots. And multiple times we got fouled, no call. Dave (Singleton) and Tyger didn’t make a basket in the second half. They had good looks. And Jaime got murdered on about four layups.”

Maybe it’s more accurate to just say they rolled snake eyes.

The Bruins are a below .500 team in Sin City. From 2013-14, when the Pac-12 tournament was moved from Staples Center to the MGM Grand Garden Arena and Steve Alford was coaching the team, they’re 13-16 counting Thursday’s loss. Since T-Mobile Arena opened in 2016, UCLA is 8-13 on its floor. And in Cronin’s four seasons as UCLA coach, the Bruins are now 4-8 in T-Mobile, including three Pac-12 tourney losses here and nonconference losses to North Carolina in 2019, Gonzaga in 2021 and Illinois and Baylor this season.

But lots of people still enjoy this place while counting their losses. Cronin still gushed about the place during his Wednesday media availability, saying the NCAA finally bringing a regional here was “long overdue,” and that it was “probably the best city in our country to host an event.”

Those early-season nonconference losses could be explained away as instances when a team might not yet have found its footing or players might be still getting used to one another. The Pac-12 tournament losses, including the last two championship games against Arizona? More puzzling, though while Cronin did not take the most recent one well, he noted a week later that it lit a fire under his team when it got to the first and second rounds in Sacramento.

This game? Soul-crushing, especially considering that the Bulldogs seemed to be the ones whose spirits were dragging at halftime, when UCLA led 46-33 and appeared to have the game proceeding at the pace it wanted.

Not having Adem Bona available didn’t help, especially on a night when Gonzaga’s Drew Timme finished with 36 points and 13 rebounds. When asked for specifics Cronin characteristically said, “He wasn’t able to play. If I wanted to elaborate, I would elaborate.”

Gonzaga’s plan seemed obvious from the first possession, when the 6-foot-11 Timme backed down Kenneth Nwuba in the post and bumped him, hard. Nwuba went down, nothing was called and Timme missed the shot anyway. Gonzaga’s star went on to display the offensive versatility that made him a first-team All-American (by the Sporting News) and a finalist for the Naismith Trophy.

But while Timme scored his team’s first 15 points and was the only Bulldog in double figures at halftime, things eventually opened up for Strawther (16 points, including three huge 3-pointers) and Malachi Smith (14 points on 6-for-11 shooting).

“Words can’t describe how proud I am of just our team and our resilience,” Strawther said. “I mean nothing was going our way. We weren’t playing our brand of basketball at all through that whole first half. We flipped that switch. And there’s not a lot of teams in the country who could bond together and make a run like that.”

UCLA, which had the majority of the crowd, delighted its fans with a 13-2 run toward the end of the first half for a 46-33 lead, playing at its preferred tempo after a blistering first 10 minutes and taking advantage of what Gonzaga coach Mark Few called “some really uncharacteristic bonehead moves in the first half. Air dribbles and I think we lost three bouncing it and traveling and doing all kinds of stuff.”

As it turned out, Gonzaga was the stronger defensive team in the second half. That’s saying something.

“They’re really, really good,” Few said of the Bruins. “They’re not only really, really good, they’re really, really tough. And I think we got knocked back, much like we did in the TCU game (in the last round, an 84-81 win). I think this time it was just because of their will and toughness.

“We were not guarding well. For whatever reason, our ball-screen coverage (on) defense slipped back to where it was in November. And it has not been like that the last six weeks, six or seven weeks. So I just challenged them on that and I said we’ve got 20 minutes. That’s plenty of time. There’s no 10-point play I’m going to draw up. Just possession by possession, we’ve got to play better defense.”

They did. The Bruins led 54-42 with 15:43 left, and then the roof caved in.

Maybe they would have been better off in another regional.

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Orange County Register

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Alexander: UCLA’s championship hopes go broke in ‘Vegas

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