Bruins break down against Indiana in gut-wrenching defeat

Mick Cronin said his players should have known what was coming in the final seconds of a game thirsting to end.

In the days leading up to a battle of college basketball blue bloods, the UCLA basketball coach had shown his team Indiana’s favorite baseline out-of-bounds play 15 times.

Five times in practice the day before the game. Five times later that night. Five times the morning of the game.

It apparently never sank in.

As Indiana prepared to inbounds the ball with 1.5 seconds to go in the second overtime Saturday afternoon, Hoosiers forward Trent Sisley executed that very play. He cut toward the basket. He took an inbounds bounce pass that gave him a clear path toward an easy bucket.

Helpless to do anything else, UCLA’s Donovan Dent reached in and hacked Sisley, sending him to the foul line for the winning free throw.

Just like that, Indiana had drawn up a breathless 98-97 victory over the Bruins inside a stunned and silenced Pauley Pavilion.

“Defense was awful all night,” Cronin said, “we deserved to lose.”

The defeat that ended UCLA’s three-game winning streak was especially crushing given the confluence of events over the last 12 minutes.

After the Bruins (15-7 overall, 7-4 Big Ten) had fought back from 10 points down in the final two minutes of regulation and played Indiana even over the next five minutes, they thought they might get the ball back on a controversial out-of-bounds call with 1.5 seconds left in the second overtime.

UCLA’s Brandon Williams had contested a missed layup by Sisley that was ruled to have gone off the Bruins out of bounds. Cronin challenged the call and when replays were shown on the video scoreboard, fans cheered as if the ball had gone off Sisley.

But the officials confirmed their initial ruling, giving the ball to the Hoosiers (15-7, 6-5). Having rewatched the play after the game, Cronin disagreed with the call.

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“Of course, my staff told me it was our ball and I just watched it and it sure looked like it was off Indiana’s elbow – I just watched it,” Cronin said. “Now, I’m watching it on a small iPad, but I watched it one time. I don’t know, that’s what I saw.”

Cronin also didn’t like what he saw from a defense that was incapable of stopping Indiana forward Nick Dorn (26 points), guard Lamar Wilkerson (24) or reserve guard Reed Bailey (24).

“They didn’t listen to our scouting report for the game, I can tell you that,” Cronin said of his players. “And that’s why you lose. I mean, everybody thinks you win and lose in this game because of players and there’s only a few teams that got way better players than everybody else.

“The rest of these games are won by execution. Trust me, I’ve won over 500 of them, I know. And I’ve never had superior talent. Execution wins games, and it’s defensive execution, block-out execution. Obviously, baseline-out-of-bounds at the end of game execution.”

It looked like the Bruins might get a huge bailout when Trent Perry nailed a 3-pointer with two seconds left in regulation, completing a comeback from 10 points down with less than two minutes to go.

“Just wanted to win,” said Perry, who led his team with 25 points. “Everybody had that same energy that we’re not going to lose this ballgame.”

Ultimately, they did, largely because of an inability to defend and too many missed layups. Most came from Dent, who missed 15 of 23 shots on the way to 24 points while playing all 50 minutes.

“We went through a stretch where we were pouting and letting one shot affect the next shot,” Cronin said. “We couldn’t score for a long time, that’s how we got down 10 – missing wide-open shot after wide-open shot because we act like somebody stole our favorite toy and we’re a 3-year-old.”

Just when it seemed as if Cronin couldn’t get any gloomier, a reporter asked the coach what he thought about the group of alumni representing eight decades of UCLA basketball that was honored at halftime. 

“Now that you mention it,” Cronin said, “I feel worse about the outcome because we have the best alumni in the history of college basketball.”