The game that was: UCLA 78, WSU 46
COUGARS
FROM LOS ANGELES -- That was the most frustrated postgame session I've had yet with this team, and understandably so. We sift through the wreckage with our game in review. Read on.
...
PLAYER OF THE GAME -- Lazeric Jones scored 18 points and was hot from the get-go, scoring 11 points during UCLA's 14-2 run that put them in control early. But mostly, this was just a steady, balanced UCLA attack that exploited every single mistake the Cougars made. And they made plenty.
PLAY OF THE GAME -- There isn't one. When a team dominates a game as thoroughly as UCLA did tonight, there's simply nothing to point to. Maybe Jones' first basket, because it came with UCLA trailing 5-0?
KEY STAT -- Take your pick. Could be UCLA's 11-16 performance from 3-point range. Could be their 26 (26!) assists on 32 made baskets. Could be their 22 points off turnovers.
QUOTABLE -- "It’s tough to lose like that. The game plan was flawless, but we just went through the motions. Just like Abe said in the locker room, if you go to Washington State, we’ve got a few top recruits, but for the most part, we’re playing against a bunch of top-100 recruits, you know what I’m saying? And they’re just getting older. You can’t just come in here and just expect to win off your talent. We had a good game against UW. We still lost. And we were just coming off competing with the top team in the conference and expected UCLA to just lay down. They’re dealing with a lot of stuff off the court, similar to what we were dealing with last year, but just like I feel last year when we were in the situation we rallied, and that’s basically what they did. I just feel like we just didn’t have it today. You’ve got to come out and compete and we didn’t compete. You don’t compete in a top conference such as the Pac-12, you lose games. That ain’t on the coaches at all. That’s all on us. If we don’t compete, we’re not going to win. Coaches can give us a flawless game plan but if we don’t execute his game plan, at the end of the day, as a team, we get the loss. It’s kind of messed up because people might look at it as, oh, coach didn’t have the right game plan. He did. We just didn’t execute, man. You’ve got to go 110 percent in situations like this, and we gave, like, 50, if even." -- Marcus Capers
NEXT UP -- Saturday at USC, 3 p.m. The Trojans (6-24, 1-16) lost 80-58 to Washington on Thursday.
Christian Caple can be reached at christianc@spokesman.com. Twitter: @ChristianCaple