Needing to be at its best late in a highly charged renewal of an old rivalry, UCLA found itself confronted by two major problems.
Its offense and defense.
Whenever the Bruins had the ball in the final minutes, they dribbled pointlessly and for too long before taking a questionable shot.
Whenever they needed to get a stop, they were befuddled by an old nemesis.
Arizona guard Jaden Bradley, a veteran who’s been around since the Wildcats and Bruins were Pac-12 rivals, unspooled some brilliance in the final two minutes to revive a chant long hated by anyone wearing blue and gold.
“U of A! U of A!”
Arizona made itself at home inside Intuit Dome on Friday night thanks in large part to the player who scored seven consecutive points for his team to lift the No. 5 Wildcats to a 69-65 victory over No. 15 UCLA.
There will be plenty of regrets for the Bruins (3-1) after they lost an eight-point lead over the final seven minutes, their offense going cold and their defense unable to stop Arizona (4-0) as the Wildcats made their final four shots.
“We didn’t execute down the stretch,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin said, “they did. That was the story of the game.”
The maddening sequence started with Bradley making a driving layup to push his team into a one-point lead. After Bruins guard Skyy Clark countered with a jumper, UCLA somehow forgot to defend Bradley on the perimeter and he rose for a three-pointer that gave his team a 65-63 advantage.
Arizona guard Jaden Bradley, right, shoots over UCLA forward Xavier Booker during the second half of the Bruins’ 69-65 loss Friday night at the Intuit Dome.
(Mark J. Terrill / Associated Press)
“We didn’t rotate to him on a perimeter pass,” Cronin said. “I mean, literally, the whole stadium was wondering, is anybody gonna rotate to him? He wanted to drive. He was waiting. Is anybody gonna rotate? I’m gonna go down the lane and shoot a layup, because he’s a smart player, great player, but nobody rotated.”
Continuing his struggles on a night he looked out of sync, Bruins point guard Donovan Dent missed a driving layup. UCLA got another chance, but forward Tyler Bilodeau misfired on a fadeaway jumper to end the possession.
Bradley then essentially put the game away when he banked a driving layup over the outstretched hand of Bruins center Xavier Booker, the ball caressing the backboard before falling through the net to give the Wildcats a four-point lead with 28 seconds left.
Dent made a layup but the Bruins never got the ball back with a chance to tie the score after guard Anthony Dell’Orso made two free throws with 17 seconds to go. Cronin said Arizona had made 13 layups while shooting 60% in the second half.
“I don’t even know how we were winning, to be honest,” Cronin said. “So we got to get better defensively.”
Pinning his point guard’s poor showing on a recent muscle strain that forced him to miss a game as a precaution, Cronin said Dent had also been limited in recent practices.
“That’s not the real Donovan Dent that you saw tonight,” Cronin said of a player who tallied 11 points on five-for-16 shooting to go with eight assists and three turnovers.
Cronin also mentioned Eric Dailey Jr.’s knee injury that had forced the forward to miss nearly a full month of practice, and Dent and Booker just starting to learn each other’s tendencies in the pick and roll.
Bilodeau’s 19 points on seven-for-10 shooting weren’t enough to keep the Bruins from fading during a somewhat sloppy showing in which they committed 12 of their 16 turnovers in the first half. UCLA also received just a combined three points from its bench, all from guard Trent Perry.
Dell’Orso scored a game-high 20 points off the bench and Bradley finished with 15 for the Wildcats, who lost to the Bruins last year in Phoenix in the teams’ first nonconference matchup since the breakup of the Pac-12.
The rematch was trending heavily in UCLA’s direction with a little more than seven minutes left after Bilodeau rose for a three-pointer that pushed his team into a 57-49 lead. But a bad possession that ended with a Dailey turnover helped fuel the Wildcats’ comeback.
Dent had a jumper blocked shortly before halftime, a fitting development for a game tilting in Arizona’s favor after a first half of big runs ended with the Wildcats holding a 28-25 lead. Dailey said he tried to encourage Dent with his shot failing to fall with any sort of regularity.
“I was just telling him to just lead, it doesn’t have to be offensively all the time — you can lead just talking, you can lead defensively,” Dailey said. “Some nights you’re not going to be on on offense, it’s OK, but as long as your effort and your mindset is on defense, you’re going to eventually be able to get out of that slump. “
UCLA fans were salty before tipoff, a group of students behind one basket chanting an expletive directed at rival USC as the Trojans polished off a 20-point victory over Illinois State.
Those students’ mood momentarily brightened when they were given tie-dye T-shirts as a tribute to the late Bill Walton, who was honored in a pregame video and in halftime speeches from fellow UCLA greats Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jamaal Wilkes. It soured again when that dreaded Arizona chant filled the arena after the Wildcats prevailed.
The teams are scheduled to meet again next season in Las Vegas, with Cronin saying he wanted to extend the rivalry another year.
In the meantime, the Bruins will try to work on everything that went wrong. It’s not a short list.
“Definitely just feel this,” Dailey said of his big takeaway, “and make sure we don’t feel like this again.”
