Cal Basketball

Bears Suffer Tough Loss to 1st Place Bruins

By Jim McGill

January 21, 2021

3,381

BERKELEY -After leading with less than 3 minutes left, the Bears were unable to hold off a late charge from 12-2 (8-0) UCLA in their 61-57 loss at Haas Pavilion tonight.

“It really was a hard-fought and good college basketball game,” said Fox after the close loss. “I was proud of the competitive effort that we made against a great team. We just made too many mistakes. We didn’t make a lot but to beat a high-level opponent, you have to play a little bit more mistake=free than we did today.”

The Bears started the night slowly, going just one for their first five in trailing the Bruins early, falling behind 8-3 early in the game.

Cal picked things up on the offensive side from there after a pair of Grant Anticevich 3’s sandwiched around a Joel Brown 3 knotted the game at 18 with 10:36 left in the half. Anticevich was the bright spot for the Bears’ offense tonight, going 8-for-11 from the field and a stirling 5-for-5 from deep.

“We have al of guys that are great driving the ball and kicking out and a lot of other shooters who can make plays,” said Anticevich. “So having other guys around me who can do those things makes it easier for me to get good shots because the defense has to honor them, as well. I think my team did a great job of creating and we played some really unselfish basketball tonight.”

The Bears took their first lead (23-22) three minutes later on a Makale Foreman (8 points) after three straight 3’s from Anticevich (2) and Brown keyed the Bears’ comeback.

The Bears closed out the half with a 36-32 lead over the Bruins.

The Bears’ shooting dropped off a bit in the second half while the Bruins took advantage of several long rebounds to extend possessions and claw their way back to 56-55 lead with 2:53 remaining on a jumper by leading scorer Cody Riley (13 points) -a lead that would hold up the rest of the game.

“You have to give credit to UCLA,” said Anticevich. “They’re a great team. They haven’t lost a game (in league) for a reason. They’re really good.

“We thought we played well after getting our players back. We shot well but we couldn’t get the win. We felt like we were right there if there were a few other plays we made or had gotten some defensive stops, it could’ve been ours, unfortunately. But we did a lot of good things so that’s something we can take away from it.”

With the loss, the Bears fell to 7-9 and 2-7 in Pac-12 play. They’re slated to play USC Saturday at 5 pm at Haas if the Trojans, whose game with Stanford tonight was suspended due to Covid-19 issues are able to play.