USC has struggled establish itself in the paint and UCLA expertly exploited that weakness Saturday, pummeling the Trojans inside during a blowout win.
Lindsay Gottlieb wanted her team to be tested by the best. That’s why she put together one of the most grueling schedules in all of college basketball, with four games against teams currently ranked in the top four.
But with three of those tests completed, the results haven’t exactly been what she — or anyone else — would have hoped. USC lost by 17 to No. 2 South Carolina and 28 to No. 1 Connecticut earlier this season. But neither of those losses were as demoralizing as Saturday night’s defeat, as No. 4 UCLA took No. 17 USC to the woodshed in an 80-46 loss that would go down as the largest margin of Gottlieb’s tenure with the Trojans. “Today, we got it handed to us,” Gottlieb said. “We can be honest and say this is an embarrassing loss.” That might be understating it. USC was outshot 53% to 27% by its rival, outrebounded 46 to 26 and outworked in pretty much every sense of the word. The offense was out of sorts. The defense was disastrous, with UCLA regularly blowing past USC in the post on its way to 46 points in the paint. It was an eye-opening collapse from a team that came into the season still clinging to national title aspirations. To a frustrated Gottlieb, it was “a hard lesson that’s painful and not fun” — but one USC perhaps needed to learn to take the next step. “I’ve seen right now in three games that we’re not as competitive as we wanted to be with the top five teams in the country,” Gottlieb said. “But I’m not sorry we have them on our schedule. We’re not trying to be a top-25 or top-15 team. We’re trying to be the national champions. We’re trying to be the best program in the country.” Whether that’s possible this season, without star JuJu Watkins, was in serious doubt after Saturday night. In the frontcourt, the Trojans are especially vulnerable. Never was that more clear than watching UCLA center Lauren Betts dominate whomever was in her path Saturday. She finished with 18 points and 12 rebounds, four of which she tallied on offense, simply by overpowering whichever Trojan big she was up against. Last season, USC had veteran bigs in Kiki Iriafen and Rayah Marshall to rely on against Betts and Co. This year, USC forwards Gerda Raulusaityte, Yakiya Milton, Dayana Mendes, Vivian Iwuchukwu and Laura Williams finished a combined 1 of 13 from the field in their first meeting with the Bruins. While USC has managed to get by without much from its frontcourt before, UCLA exploited that weakness from the start Saturday. The Trojans were 5 of 24 inside the arc through one half, left to rely instead on their long-range shooting, which had been hit or miss most of the season. That was enough to keep up for one quarter, as USC hit six of its first eight three-point attempts to offset its issues inside. With five minutes left in the first half, the Trojans were still clinging, down by just one. But from that point, those shots stopped falling. UCLA fired off a 14-0 run as USC went scoreless for five full minutes. The Trojans never recovered after that. “We want to be as good as we can be, but I think you learn harder lessons when you don’t play as well as you can or we’re undisciplined or we aren’t as focused as we need to be,” Gottlieb said. “Maybe there’s teams we can win against that way, but the ones that punish you when you do it will make you better, and that’s ultimately the lesson.”
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