The Michigan Wolverines are a good team. They entered this week in Los Angeles at 10-2 for the season. Yet, both UCLA and USC made the Wolverines second-best this week in Southern California. After USC beat Michigan on Sunday night, UCLA women’s basketball handled the Wolverines by 16 points on Wednesday, winning 86-70 in a New Year’s Day matinee game.
Statistics can and do lie. They can often fail to tell the full story of a game. They sometimes tell completely misleading tales about a game. If you watch a game, the numbers can often paint a picture completely at odds with the reality you observed with your own eyes. However, in this win over Michigan for UCLA, the box score did not lie. The stats did tell the story of how and why UCLA won so comfortably.
The biggest and most telling number in this whole game was not points. It was not connected to rebounds, steals or blocked shots. It wasn’t 3-point shooting, either, though Michigan going just 5 of 19 on triples was very important.
The most revealing statistic from this UCLA women’s basketball victory: 29 assists. The Bruins assisted on nearly all of their 35 made field goals. Get this, too: All five UCLA starters handed out at least three dimes, with Kiki Rice giving out 10 and Lauren Betts adding five. That’s a ton of assist passes. That reflects a well-connected offense with five players all understanding what to do, where to be, how to move, and how to read defenses. Cori Close had her team in sync, and when that happens, UCLA is just not going to lose.
UCLA women’s basketball has so many obvious strengths. This might be the biggest one, if the Bruins can sustain it for the whole season.