LOS ANGELES — “Passion Player of the Week” is a recognition with a lot of weight to it around UCLA women’s basketball.
One player is selected for their efforts on passion plays – impactful moments that don’t necessarily appear on the stat sheet – and is bestowed a blue boxing-style championship belt.
“It gives us another thing to work for, another thing to compete for,” sophomore Gabriela Jaquez said. “We make it a lot of fun because we watch some videos before every game of the previous game and getting the belt is just fun and funny. Something to get excited for.”
The No. 12 Bruins will put their passion to the test, especially on defense, on Thursday at Pauley Pavilion in a rematch with No. 18 Utah, which is the seventh-ranked team in the country when it comes to scoring margin.
The Utes (19-7, 9-5 in Pac-12) are outscoring opponents by an average of 20.9 points this season while averaging 81.3 points per game.
There are seven ways UCLA (20-5 overall, 9-5) measures passion plays and four of them are defensive: deflections, charges, out-of-area rebounds and assist box-outs. The Bruins have other ways of categorizing defense, too. A kill, for example, is when they get three stops in a row.
“We have live recordings of our load and how intense we’re playing,” UCLA coach Cori Close said. “We’ve been sort of shifting and a lot of that has to do with how hard we’re playing on defense. We also chart defensive rebound percentage. We want to get 75% of the defensive misses of the other team.”
Junior Alissa Pili leads Utah with 21.6 points per game, although UCLA was able to hold her to 16 in a 94-81 overtime loss in January. The Bruins are focused on her, but also seek to limit the Utes’ 3-point shooting after they made 13 of 28 (46.4%) from long range in their last meeting.
“We have to do a better job of forcing them to take hard twos,” Close said. “It’s been very well documented that they are really only hunting…
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