<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'></p> If Ben Howland has a moment of free time tonight he should turn on the Laker game.</p> If he does, he’ll see two players he recruited playing against each other in the NBA for the first time.</p> Tonight, Jordan Farmar’s Los Angeles Lakers host Arron Afflalo’s Detroit Pistons at the Staples Center in what will be an L.A. reunion for the former Bruin stars who, along with coach Howland, brought UCLA basketball back to an elite level.</p> Farmar isn’t starting at point guard for the Lakers yet. But he had a terrific summer, as evidenced by the team picking up his option for the 2009 season just a couple weeks ago.</p> Afflalo is still a rookie, but his work ethic has already been noted by coach Flip Saunders and veteran Rasheed Wallace. Wallace even compared Afflalo’s intensity to Kobe Bryant’s intensity in a recent Detroit Free Press article.</p> It’s no surprise that Farmar and Afflalo are doing OK in the league. They were both heady college players with plenty of drive. Maybe they won’t be all-stars, but I’d be surprised if they don’t contribute significantly for a while.</p> What’s odd is that coach Howland, who seems to have established a seat near the top of the basketball coaching world, still doesn’t have many players in the NBA.</p> Trevor Ariza spent a year at UCLA in Howland’s first year before bolting to the NBA. But Ariza signed to play for Steve Lavin and never seemed to buy into Howland’s style of coaching.</p> He probably should have listened to Howland’s advice to stick around in Westwood; he bounced around the league for a few years and is now finally cracking the Orlando Magic lineup in his fourth year in the league.</p> Just one of Howland’s recruits to Pitt was drafted. Chris Taft, like Ariza, probably left too soon; he was taken in the second round by Golden State but is now out of the league.</p> So tonight is a bit of a landmark moment for Howland. It’s a sign that he’s joining the ranks of college basketball’s elite coaches, and it’s a sign of things to come for UCLA.</p> The Bruins have, at the very least, four players with NBA potential on their roster this year.</p> And if you caught the news of Howland’s 2008 recruiting class – the best in the country according to most of the pundits – you know that the program is attracting the most talented, athletic players in the nation – players who have a basketball future beyond college.</p> It’s important to remember that getting players to the NBA is hardly the be all, end all of a college coach’s job. But high school recruits love to see a coach who can get his players to the next level.</p> Howland got Farmar and Afflalo into the first round of the NBA Draft. He also got them both to the Final Four. What else can a recruit ask for?</p> For UCLA fans, the most important thing about tonight’s Farmar-Afflalo matchup is that the presence of Bruins in the NBA makes Howland’s pitch to recruits even harder to resist.</p> Howland has already shown he can get a squad of solid high school players to the Final Four.</p> With better recruits coming, it seems that it’s only a matter of time before Howland hangs up that 12th banner in Pauley.</div></p> Source: The Daily Bruin</p>
Yeah Howland is the best thing to happen to UCLA in a long time. The one thing you can expect from all of them is effort, and that is a sign of great coaching.</p> </p> </p>
