I really liked this write up. Brennan: Let us never forget UCLA’s massive contribution to one of the greatest NCAA Tournament games ever
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
Apr 4 '21, 11:47
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At a normal Final Four, which is to say a Final Four that hosts not just teams but people, swarms of roving fans in bars and at parties, a strange thing happens: The fans go home. Specifically, the fans of teams that lose on Saturday go home. This depends on geography and fan base intensity, sure, but generally speaking, supporters of vanquished national semifinalists are hard to find on Sunday and Monday. They sell their tickets. They stand-by on flights. They save the vacation days. They vanish. On the day after the national semifinals, you can feel the town having been emptied out, the sudden quiet of a traveling pack halved. It’s weird. And when you do see a fan of a losing team — still proudly sporting the old school gear — it can almost feel awkward. Pitiful, even. Huh. Well, good for them, I guess.
The NCAA Tournament moves on. It plows ahead, always, relentlessly. Every round, we forget the teams who just lost almost immediately, like seconds after the final buzzer: whoosh. Wait, who did Florida State just beat? Colorado? Meh. The next game begins and nobody cares about what just happened, only what is about to. At the Final Four, your slice of the “One Shining Moment” montage tends to be a little larger by default, but even the greatest performances, the best plays, get lost in the whirlwind. The NCAA Tournament doesn’t care. It has exactly enough memory for one.
Which brings us to this Final Four Sunday’s humble plea: Remember UCLA.
Please? Just this once? Can we all, as fans of college basketball, as a sport, take a deep breath and a step back and a quiet moment of self-reflection with whatever app you use to calm your brain and think about rolling waves or whatever for 15 minutes to pause, reflect, recognize and then vow to remember what in the hell UCLA just did? Can we all sign on for that?
Because what UCLA did on Saturday night, as full participants in one of the greatest games in NCAA Tournament history, goes beyond mere basketball, beyond making shots and grabbing rebounds and playing a surprisingly tight game against an overwhelming favorite. It approached the sublime. UCLA was one half of something that gave an untold number of millions of people simultaneous joy. UCLA threw the mother of all punches. Its reward was profound heartbreak. It was a disastrous trade for the Bruins and an epochal one for the rest of us, and the very least we can do, the very least UCLA deserves, is to be remembered as more than the other team on the floor the night Jalen Suggs made That Shot.
“We might not have been one of the best teams in the country all year,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin said. “But we became one of the best four teams in the country. Period.”
Who could possibly argue with him? The Bruins arrived at Saturday night’s matchup with No. 1 overall seed Gonzaga having already punched far above their weight, to the point it was worth wondering if the scales were wrong in the first place. After their First Four start — when it trailed Michigan State by 14 in the first half before methodically overtaking the Spartans in the second and overtime — Cronin’s team upset a top-20-ish BYU team in relatively convincing fashion, then throttled the same Abilene Christian outfit that had upset a very good Texas two nights earlier.
Yes, the Bruins needed help at the free-throw line in against Alabama, which missed 14 of 25 free throws in the Sweet 16. And, yes, they benefited from some career-worst performances from Michigan’s stars in the Elite Eight. But in both of those games — over two of the best teams of the 2020-21 season — UCLA did everything it needed to on basically every possession to win. It guarded. It made things difficult. It played every trip like it was the last. Every time the favorite looked like it might pull away, UCLA got a stop, or a bucket, or both. Against the Crimson Tide, it scored 88 points in 78 trips, finding most of that statistical separation in overtime after Alabama tied the game with a 3-point buzzer-beater in regulation. (Ahem.) It was one of the most impressive mental performances of the entire season; most teams would have wilted under the circumstances. UCLA got better. Then, 48 hours later, UCLA held the Wolverines to 49 points in 59 possessions, guarding every interior shot to within an inch of its life, unfurling a Cincinnati-style Cronin classic that stymied one of the steadiest and most complete teams in the country. All along it has defied the odds not just in the macro but also in the micro, taking and making difficult shots again and again, to the point of rewiring midrange shooting expectations.
All of which sent UCLA to the Final Four, across from West Regional champ Gonzaga, a matchup to which the vast majority of the college hoops world responded with a casual wave of the hand. The spread was double digits. Did you see what Gonzaga did to Creighton? To USC, which had swept the Bruins in the regular season? The Zags hadn’t played a single-digit game since Dec. 2; they hadn’t come remotely close to losing, even after falling behind BYU by double digits in the first half of the WCC tournament final, a game they won anyway, 88-78. They arrived at the Final Four outscoring opponents by an average of 24 points per game and plus-0.34 points per possession. They were unbeaten. Their adjusted efficiency margin was peaking at levels only seen among the greatest teams of the past 25 years. When Baylor rolled Houston in the first game Saturday night, the neutral response was excitement at the certainty of Gonzaga-Baylor. We all wanted that game. Now it was a foregone conclusion.
Then — well, hell. You saw it. Where do you even start?
It wasn’t just that UCLA nearly pulled off an upset. That happens all the time. It was the how of the thing that matters. It, was for starters, this shot chart:
On the one side, you see Gonzaga: modern, efficient, ruthless. The Zags are the best layup-generating team in college basketball, and one of the best you’ll ever see. On Saturday, 22 of Gonzaga’s 37 made field goals were layups, and seven were 3s. That left eight non-layup “jumpers,” though some were floaters; Gonzaga simply does not take many midrange shots. This is the way of the future.
UCLA defies that principle. It’s not that the Bruins didn’t take layups or 3s. Obviously, they did. But the willingness with which they shoot from midrange, impressive in their first four wins in the tournament, went up yet another level against the Zags. UCLA made eight layups Saturday. It made eight 3s. The other 18 field goals it made go into the book as 2-point jumpers — and if you watched the game, you’ll know they really were 2-point jumpers: off the dribble, contested, at the elbow, or from 18 feet, or whatever, the kinds of shots that used to be de rigueur in, like, 1991, but are now classified as “bad” shots by almost everyone in the sport.
Except UCLA made them good shots. Johnny Juzang made them good shots. Juzang — against a top-10 per-possession defensive team — shot 12-of-18 from the field, scored 29 points and put on yet another of what is now his patented midrange showings. There is a unique pleasure in watching a guy get to whatever spot he wants, pull up and bury a 17-footer over a hesitating defender. There is a certain old-school glory to the way Juzang plays. It is not, strictly speaking, “efficient,” but it is if all the shots go in. Juzang’s tournament, in which he scored 137 points on 52 percent shooting, was one big bucket, each one more impressive than the last.
The easiest shot Juzang attempted all night was his last one, the one that followed his offensive rebound of his own miss at the end of overtime, a simple unguarded layup. You know what happened next. But for UCLA even to be at that point, Juzang and Tyger Campbell and Jaime Jacquez and even Cody Riley, who buried at least four step-out jumpers, had to hit shot after shot after shot. They had to hang in with a Gonzaga team that, it can not be stressed enough, did not play badly, a Gonzaga team that shot 30-of-42 from 2-point range (!) and scored 93 points in 74 possessions, or 1.26 per, which is more or less par for one of the best offensive teams in recent history.
Juzang knifed his way through the Gonzaga defense all night, making difficult shot after difficult shot. (Robert Deutsch / USA Today)
UCLA punched and counterpunched with that team all night. It led for significant chunks, and played within one bucket on either side for the vast majority of the night. The game was tied for more than six minutes. The teams traded the lead 19 times. Every time Gonzaga looked like it was going to pull away — in the second half when Riley was called for a hook and hold, giving Gonzaga two shots and the ball, and especially, say, midway through OT, when Drew Timme made back-to-back layups to make it 87-83 — UCLA would get a stop and someone, usually Juzang, would hit a tough shot on the other end. It was remakable. And even more remarkable was that in some ways it resembled the two games that preceded it. One way or the other, UCLA found a way.
It was constant self-belief. It was unyielding will. It was a group of kids so confident and locked in that they were able to play beyond the sum of their parts, above themselves, above what makes sense. It was a capturing of that elixir that the NCAA Tournament produces in unique and rare quantities, when its best teams, truly playing together, summon something more.
That feeling justifies itself. It is not dependent on result. It is the triumph of the how over the what, the joy of the journey over the outcome, no matter what happens at the end.
Then Suggs’ shot went in.
While Gonzaga’s brilliant freshman jumped on a table and his teammates went nuts, ensuring their appearance in the annual tournament highlight packages for decades to come, UCLA’s players pulled one another together. Juzang was in an impromptu, traumatized huddle, distraught while trying not to be distraught. “We came together,” Juzang would say later, his voice cracking. “We weren’t going to let anybody have their heads down. Everybody is so proud to play with each other, to play for these coaches.” Juzang, red-eyed and bleary, could barely get his words out. He spoke about pride, about fight, about being able to truly say you left absolutely everything on the floor. “That just feels like such an accomplishment.”
Afterward, Cronin couldn’t take pleasure from having been in a game that good without winning; it’s not how the second-year UCLA man, who said at his introductory news conference that he spelled “fun” “W-I-N” is wired. But he did tell his players that as much as they were “gutted” and wanted to wallow, they had to forget the last three seconds altogether.
“They are winners,” Cronin said. “They won.”
To snark back that they didn’t would be to miss the point. Gonzaga will play on Baylor Monday night, and Gonzaga will be the team we talk about now and possibly forever. That’s how these things work. But Cronin is right too. There are more ways to win than to have the most points when the buzzer goes off. If ever a team managed that, managed to bring something to a game beyond the final score, it was these UCLA Bruins.
So, yes, before Indianapolis clears out and everyone goes home and the details get fuzzy, before this becomes just another successful team in the history of UCLA’s program, before what we just witnessed becomes that really good game when Suggs hit the shot, before we all move on to Monday night, we should take a moment to honor what UCLA just did, what part it took in what will now become Gonzaga’s story.
At the very least, it was some of the best college basketball you’ll ever see. We should remember it. For a day, anyway, we should try.
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