Whicker: UCLA introduces Arizona to defense, and gravity, in blowout win

LOS ANGELES — The season isn’t over for Arizona, but the party is.

The Wildcats came into Pauley Pavilion and shot the ball as if Willie Nelson, or someone, had turned out the lights.

The team that had frolicked to a 16-1 record and was outscoring its foes by an average of 24.3 points stumbled over UCLA furniture and its own shoelaces on Tuesday night, losing 75-59 and never threatening to re-enter a game that got away in the first half.

It helped that UCLA’s players saw, or were shown, that they were ranked No. 7 and Arizona was No. 3. Although the Wildcats had won at Illinois and had only lost to Tennessee by four, they were not prepared for this kind of defense, 3-point shooting, or Final Four pedigree. Arizona was held 29 points below its average and shot 30.7% for the night, as opposed to 50.1% for the season.

“We’re going to see them again a week from Thursday,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin warned, although it was unclear whether he was warning his own players or the Wildcats.

Can the Bruins play better than this? They hit eight of 17 three-point attempts, had seven steals and eight blocked shots. Cronin had said all along that the return of Cody Riley, who wasn’t playing in November and December, would be worth “at least 10 points” to the cause, and here he hit six of 11 shots and did veteran things to the skyscraping Arizona trio of Azuolas Tubelis, Christian Koloko and Oumar Ballo.

“You can’t let a team like that be comfortable,” Cronin said.

But UCLA really nailed down the game on two other matchups.

It held Bennedict Mathurin, who had been averaging 17.8 points, to 5-for-22 shooting, using an alternating parade of mid-sized defenders.

It also got a technical knockout at the point guard position, where Tyger Campbell pestered Kerr Kriisa on the early possessions and watched him disintegrate.

Kriisa took 12 shots and missed them all, and made four turnovers, much to the amusement of the students in the crowd of 11,268. Kriisa is named after Steve Kerr, wears his No. 25, wears “Kerr” on the back of his jersey and even has the same shooting form as the current Golden State Warriors coach and former Wildcat great. Perhaps “Rondo Kriisa” was more appropriate on Tuesday.

“They hit their first four 3-pointers and then were 3 for 24,” Cronin said. “Kerr Kriisa is a really good shooter. I’ll lose sleep over what he might do next week (in Tucson). But I learned a long time ago, from Rick Pitino, that if you make a team play defense you can take their legs away from them.”

As for Mathurin, the Bruins denied him free looks at the 3-point line, where he went 3 for 6. “We wanted to make him shoot twos,” Cronin said, and the All-American candidate from Montreal went 2 for 16 inside the arc.

Arizona only got three fast-break points, thanks to the Bruins’ offensive efficiency and court balance.

It was a major hosedown for a team that was leading Division I in scoring margin, assists per game and rebounds per game. Arizona had also won its past three Pac-12 road games by 25 points apiece, which might say more about the Conference of Champions than it does about the Wildcats.

“We’d been trying to get to that next level,” said Jaime Jaquez Jr., who had a five-point burst in the second half that stopped a quasi-comeback in its tracks. Arizona had gotten within seven points on a Mathurin 3-pointer, but Jaquez hit one of his own and then took a steal all the way to a layup that dissuaded the Wildcats.

“We knew we had another gear we could get to. But basically, we like being underdogs and, even when we’re not, we’re going to bring that underdog mentality. During that stretch, I was trying to be immense on defense. It’s something that I’ve been trying to get work on, to be more active and do everything I can to be disruptive.”

The Wildcats were as disrupted as a freight train bringing Amazon boxes through L.A. On Saturday they move over to USC, not the easiest place to pick up the pieces.