Friday practice report: 'We could have as many as five guys average in double figures'

If UCLA Coach Ben Howland ever decides to give up basketball, he’d have a promising future as a play-by-play announcer. "In the last five minutes of practice," he said to open a call with reporters tonight, "Kevin Love looks like he was kicked in the [left] shin and it had an immediate bruising, so it’s a pretty serious contusion. He’s getting a precautionary X-ray; the doctor looked at it and didn’t think it was anything, but just to be sure, we X-ray everything.

"Every time one of these guys goes down, my heart ends up in my throat. You just never know. But I’m pretty confident he’s going to be fine. He walked out on his own, he walked up the stairs to the training room, so I think he’s going to be fine."

Howland pointed out that fully half of today’s practice was noncontact, but "it’s a physical game, you see it everywhere around the country."

Asked about whether he’s solidified a plan as to who the starters will be, Howland said "nope."

"I can tell you that Darren Collison will start," he said, laughing. "I think Luc [Richard Mbah A Moute] will start. I think there’s a solid chance that Josh Shipp will start.

"We’re going to have the ability to play a lot of different ways. I am going to play Luc at the 3 [small forward] this year, whether or not he starts there or we start Lorenzo [Mata-Real] or we start Alfred [Aboya], or start Luc at the 4 [power forward] or [Michael] Roll or Russell [Westbrook], all those are options.

"I’ve got to figure this out; we’ve got two weeks. That doesn’t mean it won’t change this year. I’ve got to figure out what team blends best well, what team is going to get us off to good starts. There’s one team that might be the best team offensively, there’s one that might be the best team defensively, but the bottom line is Collison, Shipp, Luc and Lorenzo, along with Roll, Russell, Alfred and Kevin, those guys are all going to get a lot of minutes."

The practices have been a bust, even with so many returning players. "We’re putting in new sets. We’ve got a lot of things to learn, but we still have to get back to our basics on how we play defense and get back in transition. We’ve got a lot to do in terms of press offenses, getting ready for any kind of junk defense early in the season. I mean you never know, we have to be ready for a box-and-one or a triangle-and-two and all the different kinds of things that can be thrown at you in the early part of the season.

"It’s so hard. Today was our 13th practice; we don’t have an out-of-bounds play in yet. We don’t have a zone play in yet. So we’ve got a lot of things to do between now and two weeks from today."

Howland also thought the Bruins would be much improved against zone defenses. "We’re going to be a good team against a zone; we’ve got very good passers. Today, Luc and Kevin were playing together at the 4 and 5 spot, and it was really fun to watch because they’re two very good passers and guys who can really catch and pass. So we’re going to be a good passing team and a very unselfish team, and a team that’s going to have very good balance in scoring. I’m hoping that we could have as many as five guys average in double figures."

Howland said that Mata-Real didn’t practice today and was ready to give the entire team some rest. "We’re going to have one more practice tomorrow and then take two days off and get healed up a little bit, and then start up again on Tuesday."

The Bruin coach was inducted into the Boys & Girls Clubs' Hall of Fame last night at a gala at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. "I was really, really touched by that. It was quite an honor for me and was really special because the Boys Club was where I learned how to play basketball and fell in love with the game of basketball there in Goleta. There were 850 people and we raised $1.4 million for the Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, and they are so important for the communities. We had about 15 people from Santa Barbara who came down, from Goleta, and they were all really, really touched and excited about what a wonderful evening it was."

Howland’s social calendar is still quite crowded. On Saturday, about 40 former players will watch practice and both the alumni and current team will gather in the afternoon at Howland’s home for a barbecue. It will be Howland's third annual alumni barbecue.

Comments

[Marco]

Any word on who attended the bbq at Coach Howland's this past saturday? I wonder if some of the all-time greats like Reggie Miller, Walt Hazzard, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, etc, showed up.