Bruins recruits are already defending the UCLA tradition

UCLA recruit Jrue Holiday has the ability and defensive toughness to make an impact with the Bruins next season. Chris Williams/Icon SMI

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -- It was a rare sight, at least for a scrimmage affiliated with a shoe company's high-school All-Star game: Amid all the cherry-picked dunks and carelessly thrown passes in a nearly empty gym at Long Island University-Brooklyn, there were a couple of perimeter players assuming defensive stances and making a real effort to guard the ball. This workout took place the day before last week's Jordan Brand Classic, with no NBA scouts or college coaches present; the lone dignitary in the room was soon-to-be Rookie of the Year Kevin Durant, a deeply slouched spectator at the end of one bench. Score was kept, but the result was meaningless. And while what Malcolm Lee and Jrue Holiday were doing on the court -- defending -- was hardly worthy of a medal, it was a strong indication that next season, they will fit right in at UCLA.

Their future coach, the defense-obsessed Ben Howland, was still on the West Coast last Friday, having participated in press conferences for Bruins freshman Kevin Love and sophomore Russell Westbrook the previous afternoon. Both players declared early for the NBA draft, but Westbrook did not hire an agent. In a press release, junior Luc Richard Mbah a Moute announced he was following the same route as Westbrook. Junior point guard Darren Collison is taking his draft decision up to the April 27 deadline, but is expected to declare. There is also talk that junior forward Alfred Aboya might not return, either to come to the aid of his ailing father in Cameroon, or pursue graduate school. Add to that the graduation of forward Lorenzo Mata-Real, and UCLA has the potential to lose six of the top seven players from its 2007-08 Final Four rotation. Which makes it all the more important that Howland has perhaps the nation's best recruiting class -- including Jordan Classic participants Holiday (Rivals' No. 1 point guard), Lee (No. 9 shooting guard), and Drew Gordon (No. 16 power forward) as well as Jerime Anderson (No. 7 point guard) -- showing up on campus in the summer.

Howland, when reached by phone, was pleased to hear of Holiday and Lee's willingness to play D. It was, he said, as if they were getting a head-start on Bruin-ball. "If they're able to come in and play good defense," Howland said, "it increases their possibility of being significant players right away -- which they're probably going to have to be."

The best-case scenario for UCLA would be that one of its two current backcourt stars, Westbrook or Collison, returns to mentor the rookies, and Mbah a Moute comes back to anchor the frontcourt. A starting lineup of Westbrook and Holiday at guard, Josh Shipp and Mbah a Moute at forward, and either James Keefe or Gordon in the low-post might be good enough to get the Bruins to their fourth straight Final Four.

Holiday, a 6-foot-3 combo guard from North Hollywood who's the prize of the class, said Howland called him from San Antonio in March; Holiday had considered making the trip, but his family had already spent enough money on airfare to see him in the McDonald's All-America game in Milwaukee. As he recalled, "Coach said he wished I could have seen [the Final Four] first, as a fan, before playing in it next year."

If the Bruins are forced to start anew in the backcourt, the prospects of them reaching Detroit seem more far-fetched, albeit not entirely outside the realm of possibility in a college hoops landscape that will be scorched by draft defections. Such a run would depend heavily on Holiday becoming an instant star. In both looks and demeanor, he'll remind UCLA fans of Collison, but the five-star super-frosh is more offensively advanced than Collison was as a freshman, and already thicker by approximately 30 pounds.

Like Collison, Holiday is a high-character recruit who comes from a strong family of athletes. Both his mother, Toya, and father, Shawn, played basketball at Arizona State, and Toya is the co-athletics director and varsity girls' hoops coach at Jrue's high school, Campbell Hall. Should the Bruins' women's tennis team be in need of a statistician, Jrue (pronounced Drew) could help there, too: his senior year, he served as the girls' tennis manager at Campbell Hall, earning a California Interscholastic Federation Division IV state title ring to go with the three he already had for his own basketball teams.

"They said I was their lucky charm," said Holiday of the tennis players, for whom he did everything from keeping stats to fetching rackets. "You know how girls play better in front of guys? So, every game, they went to work."