DANIEL WONG/ Daily Bruin Senior Staff Senior center Dan Gadzuric is one of several Bruins about to play their last games at Pauley Pavilion.
By Dylan Hernandez
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Billy Knight’s basketball career is coming to an end.
Two more games and he can’t go home again. Two more games and no more Pauley Pavilion.
All season, Knight has tried to prepare himself for his inevitable departure from the Bruin basketball program and from UCLA, but the thought of it still scares him.
“It’s so easy here,” Knight said. “The only thing you have to worry about is good and bad games. That and grades.”
But Knight concedes, there’s nothing he can do to prevent the culmination of his fifth and final season at UCLA, after which he will no longer be a campus celebrity. He will, for the first time in his life, have to find work to feed himself.
A conversation with former Bruin football player Freddie Mitchell last weekend only reinforced those fears. Mitchell, currently a wide receiver with the Philadelphia Eagles, told him, “There’s nothing like college. You have a good game, come to school and everyone talks to you about it. After school, that never happens.”
So, as the unranked Bruins (18-9 overall, 10-6 Pac-10) prepare for their final two home games of the season – one tonight against Oregon State (12-15, 4-12) and the other Saturday, which is Senior Day, against No. 13 Oregon (20-7, 12-4) – Knight is just trying to savor every remaining second that he gets to spend with his teammates.
“I’m just cherishing the moment,” Knight said. “I’m enjoying practice. It’ll probably go by really fast though.”
Similar sentiments are probably being felt by center Dan Gadzuric, forward Matt Barnes and reserve guard Rico Hines, although none of them are quite the orators that Knight is and haven’t expressed their thoughts as well.
Last home games or not, however, this week is of great significance for the Bruins. After these contests, all that remain for them are the Pac-10 and NCAA tournaments.
Up-and-down, peak-and-valley, rollercoaster, Jekyll and Hyde – even UCLA’s most casual of followers, at some point, have heard the Bruins described with the various terms synonymous with “inconsistent,” which they have been.
Last week, they followed a ghastly outing on Thursday at Cal with an electric performance on Saturday in a road win over Stanford.
It is conceivable that the Bruins drop their game tonight to OSU, which they drilled 70-48 on Feb. 2, then beat Oregon, which butchered them 91-62 on Jan. 31.
As for which Bruin team shows up this week, no honest person can offer a reasonable guess – except, perhaps, the coaches and players.
Bruin head coach Steve Lavin said he fully expected his team to experience the numerous setbacks it faced throughout the season, especially since it was starting a freshman at point guard in Cedric Bozeman.
“On the discouragement scale, 10 being the highest, I have been at 8.5 or 9 in other seasons,” Lavin said “This season, I’ve never been past 4 or 5. When Cedric got injured, it put us back six weeks. The point guard is like the central nervous system of the team.”
The Bruins, who will continue to run the simple motion offense they employed against Stanford en route to scoring 95 points, think that Bozeman has finally adjusted, that the team will not relapse back into mediocrity.
“It’ll carry over,” Hines said of the momentum it gained in Palo Alto. “What you saw against Stanford is what you’ll see the rest of the year.”