courtesy of Jack Alden

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"“We would like to have played better in that stretch in the middle of the second half, but you’re not gonna play great basketball for 40 minutes, much as I would like to and as much as I get discouraged when we don’t. Particularly when you’ve got a very gifted team like UCLA. They were down, and I think Steve’s club showed some determination themselves, because it was a 20-, 23-point game or whatever it was, and they kept playing and made some better plays and got some offensive rebounds and just killed us on the boards in the second half, and made some shots, as well. They really outplayed us at their offensive -- our defensive -- end. And we had a stretch in there where we turned the basketball over. Nick Collison had two or three turnovers in a row. Aaron had a sloppy turnover against their press, and I like teams to press us. After that timeout when I said we’ve got to attack it, then all of a sudden we got two or three layups in a row at that point. But congratulations to them, because it was a game that they could have just mailed it in, and Steve’s club didn’t. They competed and kicked up pretty hard on the offensive backboards. When you give up 20 offensive rebounds, most of the time you don’t win. “Our team lost its focus, and the crowd lost the focus, too. We don’t say that very often, but in the first half it was fantastic. It was loud, it was exciting, it was emotional and enthusiastic. The second half.... Which one comes first? Does our great play stimulate the crowd, or does their actions and their enthusiasm stimulate us? We’d like to have both. But the bottom line is they beat us to death on that backboard, and we turned it over. Then when we got refocused again, we made some nice plays. “I don’t know how close it got (11 points). But we did get a better job defensively after about a six- or seven-minute stretch. They made some shots. I felt like Jason Kapono made a living on the offensive boards.... Well, whoever made this stat sheet is drunk. Offensive rebounds ­ zero? You’d better go in there and tell Keith Langford that, because I just got done chewing his butt out because I thought (Kapono) was getting offensive rebounds and putting them back in. The statistics people had the same kind of night we did on the offensive backboards. Neither one were worth a damn. “Keith really did a nice job. Keith got out of his own frame of mind and focus on the first two possessions of the second half, because they missed shots, and Jason got the offensive rebound and put it in for a basket twice in a row. Keith did a nice job on him except for the box-outs. I asked Keith, I said, ‘Did you ever think that I’d put you on the other teams best scorer as a defensive player?’ I think that’s how he’s matured. Kirk was sensational tonight. Aaron took better care of the basketball, made better decisions. I loved one time when we moved it around a long time and all of a sudden Aaron found Nick wide open underneath for a layup. Didn’t get as much out of the bench tonight as I wanted to get, and lost some focus with some turnovers, but we’re happy. Shoot, it’s a good win. “We’ll re-group in Oakland for practice the 26th. I’m giving them one day off more than I really want to, so I challenged them tonight to make sure they did something themselves so we could come back and have a big-time practice on Thursday night, and have two really good practices before we play Cal. Deep down I really wanted them there on Christmas night, but that would be like Scrooge, so I decided not to do it.”

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