Postgame Talk: UCLA Puts Together 40 Minutes of Solid Basketball to Beat Oregon, 73-59

The Bruins showed that they can both win a road game and control a game against a bad team.

Xavier Booker (Photo credit: @UCLAMBB)

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The best thing I can say about this game is that it was fairly boring.

This is not to say that UCLA played a bad game, but rather is a statement about the Bruins’ ability to put away an inferior opponent early and maintain that for the rest of the game. The Oregon Ducks led for a total of 1:12 in this game, which all came at the very start. UCLA led for 37:01 of game time, and at no point in the second half did the Ducks cut the Bruin lead to single digits. UCLA’s 73-59 victory over Oregon was the kind of dominant victory over an inferior opponent that has eluded the Bruins for much of the season. That it came on the road, another sore spot for this team, stands out even more.

To be sure, UCLA was not playing Oregon at full strength, as the Ducks are without their two best players in Nate Bittle and Jackson Shelstad, likely for the rest of the season, but I don’t bring that up to diminish what the Bruins did here, which was take the life out of their opponents early and spend the rest of the game slowly suffocating them until the clock hit zero. Oregon spent most of the game struggling to perform anything on offense, finishing the game shooting 35.6% from the field and forcing the Ducks into 32 three-point attempts, of which they hit only nine. Kwame Evans Jr. was a force for Oregon, but he was only one man, and no one else on the Ducks got to double figures.

UCLA was not notably better on offense, but in a surprise twist, its success came thanks to the charity stripe. The Bruins shot 23 free throws in this game, a byproduct of an aggressive offensive game plan that attacked a poor Oregon defense in space, and made 20 of them. It certainly helped that Tyler Bilodeau, one of the best free-throw shooters on the team, took 11 of those free-throw attempts thanks to some smart basketball, but he also is responsible for two of the misses. Trent Perry, Xavier Booker, and, perhaps more importantly, Donovan Dent and Eric Dailey were all perfect from the line, and the 14 extra points the Bruins put up from the line represent much of the difference in this game.

I don’t think you can take much from the game as far as individual performance, given how poor Oregon is at the moment, but I do think you have to acknowledge the game Eric Dailey had. Dailey continued his run of absolutely killing the Ducks, putting up a double-double with 14 points and 11 rebounds, and while he was notably inefficient from the field, his general hustle and aggression on the boards was noticeable and much appreciated. Same too with Xavier Booker, who has started to grow into a decent player these past few weeks. Booker finished with seven points, going a perfect 2-2 from the field, but also grabbed six rebounds. He also finished the game with four fouls, so it wasn’t perfect, but if I told you a month ago that Booker was starting to develop into a decent rotation player, you’d have been shocked.

As I said, this was a boring game, which is perfectly fine. UCLA took control of the game early and never gave Oregon much of a chance. Midway through the second half, Oregon put together an 8-0 run to cut the lead to 10, and maybe you thought to yourself, “here we go again”. But then Donovan Dent went on a little scoring run of his own, outscoring the Ducks 7-2 in the span of two minutes, and that quickly spelled the end of Oregon’s last gasp. Both teams played out the string from that point on, which ultimately resulted in UCLA winning its fourth straight over the team from Eugene.

Sometimes boring is good. This is one of those times.

Go Bruins!

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