LOS ANGELES — Thomas Welsh stood near midcourt and waved his long arms to the crowd. The senior from Redondo Beach gave UCLA’s largest home crowd of the year plenty to cheer about Saturday night at Pauley Pavilion. The rest of his team didn’t.
Welsh scored 20 points with eight rebounds against Colorado, but the Bruins slipped from the top of the Pac-12 standings after a 68-59 loss.
It was Colorado’s first ever win at Pauley Pavilion and snapped a seven-game road losing streak for the Buffaloes while UCLA lost its second home game of the year. The other one came against Cincinnati in front of the team’s only other home crowd that surpassed 10,000.
Coupled with Arizona’s win over Oregon on Saturday, the Bruins (13-5, 4-2 Pac-12) fell a half-game behind the Wildcats for the conference lead.
Colorado (11-7, 3-3 Pac-12) stymied the top scoring offense in Pac-12 play, holding the Bruins to a season-low scoring total and just 5-of-25 shooting from beyond the arc.
“That was as poor as we’ve played all year,” head coach Steve Alford said. “Outside of Tom we just didn’t have much as far as good concentrated effort. Obviously, you’re not going to win at this level when you don’t have enough guys collectively to do that, but I take responsibility for that.
“That’s our job as coaches, to make sure they’re ready to play and I don’t think we were — not only were we not ready to play, just to have no energy, no effort, that’s hard to watch.”
The Bruins fell behind by as many as 17 points during the first half. Welsh scored 10 straight points in the second half to cut the Colorado lead to four with 5:20 to go. After hitting his second of back-to-back 3-pointers, the senior center paused to egg on the crowd before going to the bench for a timeout.
Despite the crowd’s roars, the Bruins gave up five straight points after the timeout and never got to within one possession.
“We had spurts like that, where we were getting stops and cutting their lead down a little bit,” Welsh said, “but we didn’t sustain our momentum.”
At times, the Bruins were superb on defense. They forced three shot-clock violations. They held the Buffaloes scoreless for a nearly five-minute stretch in the second half, but only got to within seven points during the defensive stand.
“We just couldn’t score,” Alford said.
UCLA missed its first seven shots from distance, not knocking down a 3-pointer until the 2:46 mark of the first half, and missed 10 free throws. Forward Alex Olesinski and guard Chris Smith combined for a 0 for 5 night from the stripe.
Guard Kris Wilkes had 10 points and nine rebounds, while guard Aaron Holiday also had 10 points, but tallied only four assists to six turnovers. The Bruins had 10 turnovers to 13 assists.
Alford said the team was coming off its best game of the year, a 19-point win over Utah on Thursday in which the offense and defense clicked effortlessly. The young Bruins were peaking at the top of the Pac-12 standings.
Now it’s about understanding success and sustaining it.
“One thing I did tell them was you gotta understand why we played so well against Utah,” Alford said. “We had great energy, we had great effort, we had good togetherness, we fought. I didn’t think we had any of that tonight and when you don’t do that in league play, you’re going to get beat.”