Senior Day Part 2

Oregon head coach Ernie Kent has complained that his Ducks have had to play UCLA for 4 of UCLA's last 8 senior days. On Senior Day, the home team is all pumped up and ready to play, and the crowd is doubly into it. Kent was right to be concerned, because despite some early struggles, UCLA came out on top, 94-68 over the once again hapless Ducks.

Here are some notes for the statisticians in all of us. This was Darren's and Alfred's 138th game played as Bruins, setting a new school record for games played in. They also set a record with 116 career wins each. It was Josh's 130th career start. These records are near-impossible to beat, since this number of games participated in sort of requires that a team make deep tournament runs in consecutive years, as UCLA has.

The team let Oregon kind of hang around early in the game, unable to put them away quickly. Slow defensive rotations, often the fault of Nikola Dragovic, let to many made 3-pointers by Oregon. Some dude named Drew Willey on Oregon made 18 points, solely on 3's. Oregon led by as many as 5 points, but the Bruins got it together toward the end of the first half, to take a 7-point halftime lead. They never looked back after that, and again Josh had a field day, scoring 28 points, including 4 three-pointers.

Unfortunately the 3-year streak of winning the Pac-10 title was broken because Washington got more conference wins. Darn WSU. Anyway, the final Pac-10 standings, after tiebreaker rules are as follows, and they determine the conference tournament seedings.

1) Washington
2) UCLA
3) Cal
4) Arizona State
5) Arizona
6) U$C
7) Washington State
8) Oregon State
9) Stanford
10) Oregon

Remember, the Pac-10 tourney now includes all 10 teams, with the 7th seed playing the 10th seed and the 8th seed playing the 9th seed in the two "play-in" games on Wednesday. Washington plays the winner of the 8-9 game and UCLA plays the winner of the 7-10 game. This means the Bruins play Washington State or Oregon. History tells us that Oregon will lose horribly to WSU, so UCLA will likely have to play the Cougars again.

For a printable version of the bracket, including game times, find it at the Official Pac-10 conference tourney page or download my version here (Updated 3-11-09).

Go Bruins!