UCLA Loses at Playing USC’s Game : College basketball: Trojan defense makes Bruins shoot from the outside, where they struggle in 72-62 loss.

Coach Jim Harrick could see a silver lining, despite the bitter blow of a loss at home Thursday night to USC.

“I still think we’ll go to the NCAA tournament, but we are going to have to do better than we did tonight,” Harrick said after the hot-shooting Trojans beat UCLA, 72-62, at Pauley Pavilion.

“Take nothing away from the Trojans,” Harrick said. “They played an excellent game and they shot well, especially Rodney Chatman.”

Harrick admitted that the Bruins’ hopes of finishing second behind runaway Arizona in the Pacific 10 are fading. The Bruins, 8-6 in the Pacific 10, fell half a game behind Arizona State (8-5). The game between the Sun Devils and UCLA on March 11 at Tempe, Ariz., could be decisive. California, which virtually knocked Washington State out of competition for second, is 7-6.

“This game came down to the ability to shoot the ball,” Harrick said. “Unfortunately, there are games in which you don’t shoot well, and this was one of those for us.

“When the Trojans doubled up on (Richard) Petruska and (Ed) O’Bannon, we became an outside-shooting team. That’s not our style.

“We should have been throwing the ball inside and passing it back out. It seemed that every time we did pass it out, something went wrong--we were called for traveling or missed.”

Asked about why there was so much trouble getting the ball inside to Petruska, Harrick pointed out that he had only one rebound in 27 minutes.

Petruska scored two of the baskets as UCLA jumped in front, 6-4. But then the big man didn’t score again until 2:14 to play.

“I was open,” said the 6-foot-10 senior, the biggest man on the floor. “They just weren’t looking for me.”

Harrick said the Trojans, in addition to keeping the ball away from his big men, did quite a job stopping the fast break.

“They kept running at (Tyus) Edney and bothered our running game,” Harrick said. “But most of that stuff mattered only because we shot so poorly.”

O’Bannon, held to 17 points, said USC doubled up on him and beat UCLA to the rebounds.

“I thought we were ready to play, “ he said. “And I know we didn’t take them lightly.”

O’Bannon and Edney sparked a rally in the second half that cut the Trojan lead to 54-50. The comeback began when Lorenzo Orr went out with four fouls.

“I had to bring him back sooner than I wanted,” Trojan Coach George Raveling said. “But this was too big to take chances.”

Orr avoided the fifth foul, stopped O’Bannon from scoring and contributed five points in the closing minutes to help preserve the victory.

Raveling said that, with the Bruins trailing in the second half, Harrick was forced to gamble. He went to the zone defense, daring the Trojans to shoot the three-pointers.

“It was a calculated gamble,” Raveling said. “But it didn’t work, and we hit the key three-pointers to win the game.”

In the first half, the Bruins were five for 11 on shots from long range and USC was three for nine.

But in the second half, Chatman was two for three and the Trojans were four for eight. UCLA slid to three for 12.