USC Basketball: UCLA Star Explains Why Bruins Had So Much Trouble Defending Standout Trojan

He was on a classic heater.

In surprising the UCLA Bruins at Pauley Pavilion with a 62-56 victory over the home team, your USC Trojans managed to "improve" to an 11-16 record on the year. 

The star of the show for the Cardinal and Gold was redshirt senior point guard Boogie Ellis, who chipped in 24 points on 9-of-18 shooting from the floor (3-of-7 from deep) and 3-of-7 shooting from the foul line.

It was a strong enough effort to utterly befuddle Bruins junior transfer wing Lazar Stefanovic. The 6'6" swingman relayed as much in his postgame comments last night, per UCLA Communications.

“Lack of concentration, I guess," Stefanovic said of the team's struggles to contain Ellis on the night. "Being aware of where he is, and I think it goes down to the same thing with the shooting percentages. We knew that we shouldn’t let him shoot, and he is one guy that really needs to score for them to win games, and we weren’t able to stop him.”

Ellis has been struggling to play through a hamstring injury for much of the 2023-24 season, and it appears that, despite Andy Enfield bringing in a highly-regarded recruiting class, Ellis will fall short of his hoped-for ambition of making a deep March Madness run. USC could technically still qualify for the NCAA Tournament next month, but the team would need to win the Pac-12 Tournament to do so. Given that the Trojans are 5-11 in the conference so far, I'd say those odds are slim.