MADISON, Wis. — Can a team be in crisis just a handful of games into conference play?
UCLA is testing that possibility given what happened here Tuesday night as part of a larger downward trend.
Lacking one of their top players with guard Skyy Clark sidelined by a hamstring injury, the Bruins also were deficient in many other areas.
Defense. Heart. Toughness. Cohesion. Intelligence.
In a game that the Bruins needed to win to get their season back on track and have any realistic chance at an elite finish in the Big Ten, they fell flat once more.
Another terrible first half led to another failed comeback for UCLA during an 80-72 loss to Wisconsin on Tuesday night at the Kohl Center, leaving the Bruins in search of answers that seem elusive.
“We have still not learned how to give ourselves a chance in a big game like this on the road,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin said, alluding to repeated failures in hostile environments.
The Bruins were out of sorts offensively and continued to suffer inexcusable breakdowns on defense, particularly early in the game while falling into a 20-point hole for the second time in four days.
“You can’t win” in that scenario, Cronin said. “Like, it’s literally like saying, ‘All right, Wisconsin’s up 20. Now let’s tip it off and try to beat them.’ ”
One of the few times the Bruins showed fight came during a dustup with 10 seconds left. Eric Dailey Jr. pushed Wisconsin’s Nolan Winter after absorbing a hard foul, forcing a scrum of players to congregate along the baseline. Winter was assessed a flagrant-1 foul and Dailey a technical foul that was offset by a technical foul on Badgers guard Nick Boyd.
About the only thing to celebrate for the Bruins was not giving up.
Thanks to a flurry of baskets from Dailey and a three-pointer from Trent Perry that broke his team’s 0-for-14 start from long range, UCLA pulled to within 63-56 midway through the second half. Making the Bruins’ rally all the more improbable was that much of it came with leading scorer Tyler Bilodeau on the bench with four fouls.
But Wisconsin countered with five consecutive points and the Bruins (10-5 overall, 2-2 Big Ten) never mounted another threat on the way to a second consecutive loss.
“Our offensive struggles were so bad,” Cronin said, “that it had our heads messed up on the other end” of the court.
Dailey scored 18 points but missed all five of his three-pointers, fitting for a team that made just one of 17 shots (5.9%) from long range. Bilodeau added 16 points and Perry had 15 after playing the second half with a bandage on his chin after taking a hard fall while diving for a loose ball in the first half.
“When you score that many points on the road,” Dailey said, “you definitely should win the game.”
What happened on the other end of the court dictated a different outcome.
UCLA’s inability to keep Boyd out of the lane helped him score 20 points to lead the Badgers (10-5, 2-2), who won in large part by their volume of three-pointers, making 10 of 30 attempts (33.3%) from beyond the arc.
Cronin said his team needed to do a better job of following the scouting report and learning how to stay in front of the ball defensively.
“The first half,” Cronin said, “we didn’t contain the ball, so it was layup or kick-out three because they have us on the run because we were getting beat off the dribble — the same thing at Iowa. That is the No. 1 thing. That has to change.”
Unveiling a turnover-choked, defensively challenged performance, UCLA played as if it were trying to top its awful first-half showing against Iowa from three days earlier.
It didn’t help that the Bruins were shorthanded from tipoff.
With Clark unavailable, Cronin turned to Perry and pivoted to a smaller lineup featuring forward Brandon Williams alongside Bilodeau as the big men. Cronin said Williams earned the start based on his having been the best player in practice Monday. But a case of the stomach flu forced him to ask out of the game early and he wasn’t much of a factor in his 17 minutes.
For the opening 10 minutes, it felt like a repeat of Wisconsin’s blowout victory over UCLA during the Big Ten tournament last March. The Badgers made seven of 11 three-pointers on the way to building a 20-point lead midway through the first half as Cronin continually tinkered with his lineup, trying to find a winning combination.
It never came.
He tried backup center Steven Jamerson II for a little more than a minute before yanking him after Jamerson committed a foul. He put in backup guard Jamar Brown and took him out after Brown gave up a basket and fumbled a pass out of bounds for a turnover. Backup guard Eric Freeny got his chance as well and airballed a three-pointer.
Wisconsin surged ahead with an early 13-0 run and nearly matched it with a separate 11-0 push. The Bruins then lost Perry for the rest of the first half after he hit his chin while diving for a loose ball, pounding the court in frustration with a balled fist before holding a towel firmly against his injured chin during a timeout.
Just when it seemed as if things couldn’t get worse, they did. Williams limped off the court with cramps late in the first half and the Bruins failed to box out Wisconsin’s Andrew Rohde on two possessions, leading to a putback and two free throws after he was fouled on another putback attempt.
UCLA almost seemed fortunate to be down only 45-31 by the game’s midpoint, though being on pace to give up 90 points couldn’t have pleased a coach known for defense.
“Defensively,” Cronin said, “it’s hard to win if you give up 80 [points] and 45 in the first half.”
Another comeback that came up short didn’t make things any better.
“We’ve got to dig deep within ourselves,” Perry said. “Cronin’s been telling us since Day 1 what to do and sometimes it’s just not clicking for all of us as a collective unit, and we’ve just got to take this as a learning lesson. … At the end of the day, it’s just defense. We have to lock in and lock down, that has to be our motto, 100%.”
So does this qualify as a crisis? How’s the players’ mindset amid their first losing streak of the season?
“We’re good,” Perry said. “We know it’s a long season, we have a lot of other games to play, we’ve still got at least two more months to play, you know? I mean, it’s like coach Cronin said — it’s like the NBA and the Big Ten — you win some, you lose some, but at the end of the day, how are you going to fight back?”
The answers will come soon enough, a quick reversal needed to avoid a season on the sink.
