UCLA and USC are bringing ‘Showtime’ back to LA college basketball

TEMPE, AZ — Steve Alford is a happy man.

Standing outside of the visitors’ locker room at Wells Fargo Arena, taking questions from the assembled media on hand, the coach of the UCLA Bruins finally has a moment to relax.

His star player, Lonzo Ball, is fine despite tweaking his right ankle earlier in the night.

His team, now ranked No. 3 in the country, is also fine after surviving a trap game at Arizona State. Two nights later, UCLA would travel to Tucson to face a top-10 Arizona team and win that game, too.

UCLA went 7-0 in the month of February, a month it entered on a two-game losing streak. The Bruins are playing a fun, entertaining brand of basketball, and they might be playing it better than any other team in the country at the moment.

Indeed, life is good right now for Alford and UCLA. In a year when the Lakers are near the bottom of the NBA standings and the Clippers are, well, the Clippers, the Bruins are the best show in town.

That doesn’t mean they are the only show in town, however. And while they are helping to make the city of Los Angeles into a college basketball town again, that’s an undertaking that can’t be done alone.

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If February was a dream for the Bruins, it was a nightmare for the USC Trojans.

USC finished February with four straight losses and did not post a victory against a team ranked higher than No. 10 in the Pac-12 standings. The last of those losses was the one that hurt the most, a game in which Andy Enfield’s team led the Sun Devils by 10 points with less than three minutes remaining before going on to lose by one.

“We’re going to come back even harder,” Trojan forward Bennie Boatwright said after the loss. “We won’t sulk on it. We just need to wash our hands and move on.”

Despite the skid, USC is still in good shape to earn an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament. It began the season at a torrid pace, winning 14 consecutive games.

No win was bigger than the one that came on Jan. 25 inside the Galen Center when the Trojans took care of then-No. 8 UCLA, sending the Bruins home with an 84-76 loss.

The victory marked Enfield’s first win against a nationally ranked UCLA team, a moment he’s been building towards ever since infamously telling his players back in 2013, “If you want to play slow, go to UCLA.”

That comment was made just months after Enfield rose to fame at Florida Gulf Coast and Dunk City, leading the Eagles to a Sweet 16 trip before being hired away by the Trojans.

He took some criticism for the quote (that first USC team finished 11-21, while the Bruins went to the Sweet 16), but the reasoning behind it was sound. Enfield wanted the rivalry to be as competitive as it used to be, and after four years, it finally is.

The fourth-year coach has been a force on the recruiting trail, bringing in four-star prospects like Boatwright, Jordan McLaughlin, Elijah Stewart, and Chimezie Metu. He has also made the school an attractive place for high-profile transfers, welcoming in former Duke point guard Derryck Thornton Jr. and Louisville small forward Shaqquan Aaron.

The epitome of a players’ coach, Enfield has been quick to accept criticism and deflect praise throughout the season. That was true after the Trojans’ collapse in Tempe.

“We aren’t going to put the blame on anybody except me,” said Enfield. “It’s a collective effort and we’re in this together. We’ve had a great season with some tough losses as of late, so now we have to bounce back.”

The Trojans got back to their winning ways last week by thumping Washington State and Washington inside the Galen Center, keeping them on the right side of the bubble heading into the Pac-12 tournament.

When asked for his thoughts on his team’s NCAA tournament chances, junior shooting guard Elijah Stewart didn’t seem concerned in the slightest.

“I feel like we should be fine,” Stewart says. “We just have to take it game by game, but I’m not worried about that.”

Barring a surprise, USC should hear its name called on Selection Sunday for a second consecutive year, something that hasn’t been done since the days of O.J. Mayo, Nick Young, and Taj Gibson.

For the first time in six seasons, they will be joined in that tournament field by crosstown rival UCLA.

* * *

The Bruins are 28-3 and are led by the always calm, always cool Lonzo Ball.

Ball’s name is cool. The way he walks onto the floor for pregame warmups — behind the rest of his jogging teammates — is cool.

Ball never shows too much emotion, because caring too much about anything isn’t cool.

At one point in the Arizona State game, he tried a nifty but ill-advised behind the back pass to save the ball underneath his own basket, and it led to a pair of Sun Devil free throws. Seconds later, he stood with his foot over the lane line, daring an official to call a lane violation.

He gets away with these things because he’s Lonzo Ball, the best player on one of the best teams in the country. You may have seen him pulling up from 30 feet to hit a dagger three-pointer, or flying high for alley-oops once not thought to be possible.

But while Ball (or his father) might make the majority of the headlines, UCLA’s full cast of characters is plenty deep.

There’s TJ Leaf, the imposing freshman forward who is second on the team in scoring. The coach’s son, Bryce Alford, has made more three-pointers than any power conference player in the country. Isaac Hamilton, Thomas Welsh, and Aaron Holiday are all averaging double figures as well.

Holiday is scoring at a clip of 13 points per game and plays starter minutes for Alford, but the point guard has come off the bench in all 31 games this season. He started every single game in his first season.

“I just have to come in with an aggressive mindset,” says Holiday. “Coming off the bench cold, you can’t be passive. So being aggressive gets me going and helps everyone in the long run.”

One more bench player, freshman Ike Anigbogu (a raw but talented big), rounds out a seven-deep rotation for the Bruins that few teams across the country can match.

“It’s a fun group to coach and a fun group to be around,” Alford said after the win in Tempe. “I think we are really starting to grow and hit our stride. We’re playing good basketball right now so hopefully we can continue that.”

The city of Los Angeles loves a winner, and the legendary Pauley Pavilion — notoriously tough to fill when the home team is struggling — has been hopping since December.

The Bruins are averaging more than 10,000 fans a game at home, and the fact that they lead the conference in road attendance is evidence that their brand is just as strong as it used to be.

To watch a UCLA game now is to watch any UCLA game ever. The Bruins play in the same arena, in the same neighborhood, wearing the same uniforms they have since the 1960s.

Pauley can still rock like it did back in the good ol’ days (if you don’t know what those days entailed, block out five hours and ask a UCLA fan). Getting to a game entails driving through swanky areas like Beverly Hills, Brentwood, or Bel-Air.

The jerseys still have the same four letters arcing across the chest, and the blue and gold coloring reeks of old school, blue blood, college basketball tradition.

From 1962 to 1976, the Bruins went to the Final Four on 13 separate occasions. They’ve been back to the sport’s promised land just five times in the past 40 years, however, and their last trip was in 2008.

Throughout the season, the narrative has been “UCLA has Final Four potential if it could only play defense.” Alford and company have been hard at work trying to change that, and they may have hit a breakthrough.

His team hasn’t given up more than 80 points in a game since that late-January loss at USC, and they haven’t had to slow down their high-octane offense to achieve that. The Bruins have won all nine games since that loss, scoring at least 95 points in four of them and reaching triple digits twice.

“We’ve done a really good job of defending in this stretch,” says Alford. “Our defense is getting better, our efficiency is getting better, and you can see that every time we get a stop and get out into transition, that’s when we are very good.”

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The story goes like this.

In 1979, a USC alum and businessman named Jerry Buss purchased the Los Angeles Lakers. Buss had two goals for his new franchise: Make the team good, and make the entertainment level just as high.

He modeled some facets of the team’s arena after a popular Santa Monica club, which included dimming the crowd lights and turning the Forum Club into the hottest nightclub in the city.

Basketball-wise, he wanted the Lakers to play an up-tempo, high-offense brand of basketball. Specifically, he wanted his games to feel like the ones played between the Trojans and Bruins at the college level.

Those Lakers would go on to be known as Showtime, winning a total of five NBA titles while putting on the most entertaining show in basketball in the process.

It’s a reach to say that college basketball in Los Angeles will ever return to the consistent levels of excitement that pre-dated and inspired those Laker teams, but we could be in the first stages of something close.

UCLA doesn’t play slow anymore. In fact, no team in the country plays at a more efficient and fast pace than the Bruins do.

On the other side of town is USC, a team with far less tradition but a future that is nearly as bright.

Luckily, the city is big enough for the both of them.