And then the bench really stepped up. We can’t keep writing about Aday Mara, mostly because there’s only so many ways to say that he’s very tall and pretty athletic for his size, so he should play as many minutes as he can. In this game, he missed some point-blank shots, which is the thing that draws immediate notice and gets people thinking he played an overall poor game, but defensively he once again changed most of what Michigan State wanted to do with his presence in the lane. The Spartans scored 32 points in the 24 minutes Mara was on the floor and 29 points in the 16 minutes he was off of it. I don’t care if he scores any points if those are the defensive splits that get spit out when he’s on there. This was a tougher matchup for him on the glass, with Michigan State’s physicality, and that’s the obvious area where he needs to improve this offseason – he’ll need to bang inside much more next season.

Lazar Stefanovic had his best game in a month, obviously hitting the most critical shot of the game to put the Bruins back in front 61-59. His last made three before this game came against Rutgers on January 13. If UCLA is going to make a run in March, the Bruins will need a shooter like Stefanovic to make some big shots. This is when he needs to start embracing his inner David Singleton – and this game was a step in the right direction.

Trent Perry had one bad play late (and he wasn’t seen again after that) but it shouldn’t outweigh his contributions. He forced a jump ball on an offensive rebound, grabbed two defensive rebounds as well, and showed a level of competitive fire that was needed in a game like this against an opponent like that. To be quite honest: I was expecting him to be relegated to pure spot minutes by this point in the year, and he’s actually done a nice job hanging around at the end of the regular rotation. With Andrews still not quite over the doldrums, apparently, getting capable minutes from Perry in games like this is huge.

The reason this should leave you with optimism is simple: this far into the season, it’s more likely that Dailey, Johnson, and Andrews return to playing well than continue to play like they did in this game. Dailey has been UCLA’s best offensive player this year, and he was still able to hit the game-winner even when his day was not going well. Johnson has been UCLA’s best two-way player, and he’ll almost certainly return to that. And Andrews has shown major signs of awakening in the last three weeks, and as the games get more serious, we’d bet on that trend-line generally continuing.

UCLA probably should have beaten Michigan State somewhat comfortably last night, if it had gotten performances from three of its starters similar to what they’d been demonstrating lately. That the Bruins still beat the Spartans with those three playing pretty poorly is a very good sign as the calendar slowly turns to March.