Bruins Barely Avoid More Humiliation

When you save yourself from falling off the cliff, the act of survival is enough. You can look pretty some other time.

And so the Bruins breathed a huge sigh of relief after Wednesday’s 83-77 victory over UC Santa Barbara before 6,927 at Pauley Pavilion. Today, perhaps, the Bruins can ponder why they did not demolish the winless Gauchos.

In the moments after the game, and in the week after a humiliating defeat to Cal State Northridge, the margin of victory was irrelevant. Another upset at Pauley could have irreparably punctured the Bruins’ confidence before the calendar flipped to December.

“I’ve been here too long not to be satisfied with a win,” senior guard Earl Watson said. “We can’t feel like we’re on top of the world, because we’re not. But you don’t get an extra win for winning by 20 points.”

Sloppily or otherwise, the Bruins (2-2) maintained their record of never losing to Santa Barbara. The Bruins are 18-0 in the series.

Jason Kapono scored 24 points and Dan Gadzuric 21 to pace the Bruins, who trailed with eight minutes remaining.

“Obviously, you feel better when you win by 40,” Kapono said. “But you just want to win, by one point or 20, nice-looking or bad-looking or whatever. It wasn’t the prettiest win, but we won. That’s the bottom line.”

The Bruins trailed at halftime, 41-38, and neither team led by more than four points through the first 14 minutes of the second half.

With 8:09 left, Gadzuric committed his second foul within a minute and his fourth of the game. The Bruins yanked him, not a good sign considering he had 21 points at that time and UCLA trailed, 64-63.

But freshman T.J. Cummings, who missed his only shot in the first half and had not scored at that point, drove the baseline for a dunk and a 65-64 UCLA lead. Then Watson, who missed both of his shots in the first half and had two points at the time, made a three-pointer to give the Bruins a 68-64 lead.

The Bruins scraped their way to a 72-66 lead, enough to withstand the three-minute scoreless stretch that followed but certainly not enough to convince the Gauchos of the inevitability of their defeat. The Gauchos are 0-4 and playing without two injured starters, but they threw a scare into UCLA.

Mark Hull, who attended Hoover High in Glendale, scored a career-high 23 points for Santa Barbara. Hull, who lists his favorite book as “They Call Me Coach” by John Wooden, said the depleted Gauchos did not find consolation or moral victory in the house that Wooden built.

“We should have beaten them,” Hull said. “We weren’t just here to hang with them. We should have won.”

The Gauchos would have won had they shot as well as they did in the first half. They shot 56% overall and made six of 10 three-pointers, with Hull making six of seven overall and all three of his three-pointers. But Santa Barbara shot only 43% in the second half.

“We had a hard time getting five guys on the same page the last four or five minutes of the game,” Santa Barbara Coach Bob Williams said. “I thought UCLA did a good job defensively. They weren’t giving us the easy looks.”

Said UCLA Coach Steve Lavin: “‘It would have been easy, coming off the Northridge loss, where your confidence could be a little bit shaken, to revert back to that. But we slowly pulled away from Santa Barbara, as difficult as that was.”

At this point of the season, Pauley Pavilion and its home team strikes such little fear into the hearts of opponents that, with the Gauchos up by five points, the visiting fans loudly chanted that the unranked Bruins were “over-rated, over-rated.” The UCLA fans did not bother to shout down the Santa Barbara fans.

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