PHOENIX — There was no letup in UCLA on Saturday, no resting on defense and few ill-considered shots. There were also no extravagant celebrations Saturday after the top-seeded Bruins beat No. 3-seeded Xavier, 76-57, in the championship game of the NCAA West Regional at U.S. Airways Center.
Freshman center Kevin Love gave point guard Darren Collison a piggyback ride, and senior center Lorenzo Mata-Real used his mother’s video camera to record the teary-eyed UCLA parents in the stands, but otherwise the Bruins were purposeful in speaking more about “unfinished business” than about Saturday’s accomplishments.
The victory moved UCLA (35-3) into its third consecutive and 18th overall Final Four and gave them 98 NCAA Tournament victories. Kentucky has the most with 100. Two more wins for the Bruins, and they will be national champions for the 12th time, but that’s getting ahead of the story. Xavier (30-7) was in only its second Elite Eight.
The Bruins will play the winner of today’s game between the South Region’s top teams, Memphis and Texas, in a national semifinal next Saturday in San Antonio.
UCLA lost to Texas, 63-61, Dec. 2 at Pauley Pavilion and beat Memphis two years ago in the West Regional final. Two years ago, UCLA lost to Florida in the national championship game, and last year the Bruins lost to the Gators in a semifinal.
“So we’ve been runner up and semifinalist,” Love said. “Now we need the other thing.”
But that’s also getting ahead of the story.
For the first time in this NCAA Tournament (running over 16th-seeded Mississippi Valley State doesn’t count) UCLA dominated a good team from start to finish.
Love was named the region’s most outstanding player after his 19-point, 10-rebound performance. Junior forward Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, the only Bruin to have started in the three consecutive regional finals, had 13 points and 13 rebounds and exhibited no evidence of soreness in his sprained left ankle.
“I told you it felt better,” Mbah a Moute said. A day earlier he had limped into the arena wearing a protective boot.
Sophomore Russell Westbrook was crackling with energy and scored first with a dunk after a steal from Xavier star Josh Duncan. He finished with 17 points and three assists. Point guard Darren Collison, motivated by comments from Xavier senior Stanley Burrell, who said he was eager to guard Collison, rebounded from a four-point, five-foul output Thursday against Western Kentucky to have 19 points and five assists.
Yet UCLA coach Ben Howland put the net around the neck of fourth-year junior Josh Shipp, who was the only starter not to score in double figures.
“He deserved it,” Howland said.
It was a jump stop and an assist to Love by Shipp that, Howland said, “made me smile.”
It has been Shipp’s steadfast equanimity in handling criticism of his own game and of the team’s underwhelming wins over Texas A&M and Western Kentucky that Howland said he appreciated.
It was UCLA’s defense that earned wide-eyed appreciation from Xavier Coach Sean Miller. He watched the Bruins pressure every pass, stifle his 5-foot-7 point guard Drew Lavender, who had five points on two-of-nine shooting, and confuse forward Josh Duncan, who had scored a career-high 26 against West Virginia on Thursday, into scoring only 11 on four-of-11 shooting.
“They are physical,” Miller said. “They blitz and trap every pick-and-roll you set. They trap the low post. They pressure the ball. They have sometimes four players on the court who are 6-7 or taller, and they don’t foul. I’m telling you, if you play as hard as they do and have the size that they do and the strategy and that offensive team can’t put fouls on them, it is really, really hard to score.”
After a floating jump shot from Collison with five seconds left in the first half gave UCLA a 33-24 halftime lead, the Bruins staggered Xavier with a 17-2 run early in the second half. It was started by that jump-stop pass from Shipp to Love, who converted a dunk, and it was finished with a three-pointer from Love. It gave UCLA a 48-28 lead and it left no doubt about the outcome.
Shipp said that what the Bruins are feeling now isn’t pressure. “It’s just that we aren’t finished yet,” Shipp said.
Mbah a Moute said when the Bruins beat Memphis two years ago, “We were all just excited because we didn’t know.”
“Last year was a little different and we weren’t happy because we didn’t have a good outcome,” he added. “This team has more experience and more talent than the past couple of teams had. So I definitely feel like we’re more ready now.”
UCLA is only the third team to reach three consecutive Final Fours since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
“It’s unbelievable,” Howland said. “That’s a real credit to how good our players are and how well they perform under pressure. I think this is, by far, the best team in the last three years.”
Whether that’s true or not will be the rest of the story.
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