'Blessed' Muhammad, Howland fight adversity to put UCLA on top

• UCLA looked to be going in the wrong direction before a 10-game winning streak
• The Bruins are regular-season Pac-12 champs at 13-5 in league play and 23-8 overall
• Shabazz Muhammad is a projected first-round NBA draft lottery pick

LOS ANGELES – Shabazz Muhammad is going home this week and going home in style.

"A conquering hero," his UCLA basketball coach, Ben Howland, says of his star freshman leading the Pacific 12 champion Bruins into the conference tournament in Las Vegas, Muhammad's hometown.

Muhammad says it will be as fun as you'd imagine it to be, and very meaningful as well. There were, of course, NCAA eligibility questions about Muhammad -- considered the No.1 recruit in the country last year -- that prompted an investigation and caused him to miss the first three games of the season.

"That was a pretty down time for me, missing games and thinking I might not be able to play," Muhammad, a 6-6, 225 left-handed swingman, said in an interview Tuesday with USA TODAY Sports. "Now you look and we're Pac-12 champs and going into the tournament feeling really confident. I feel so blessed."

So does Howland, who this time last year was both fending off criticism from fans upset at the Bruins not making the NCAA tournament and taking a defensive posture in the face of a Sports Illustrated article that portrayed Howland and some of his veteran players in a very unflattering manner.

Despite the hubbub, Howland brought in perhaps the top recruiting class in the country, headlined by Muhammad and also including highly rated Kyle Anderson, Jordan Adams and Tony Parker.

How did that work out? Not great at first. Three of Muhammad's first five games were UCLA losses to Georgetown (understandable), Cal Poly (unexplainable) and San Diego State (somewhere in-between).

But a hot streak came next. Muhammad scored more than 21 points in five of six games, and the Bruins ran off 10 consecutive wins.

A few conference road losses lay ahead of them, including an embarrassing 12-point loss just last week at Washington State. But there were many more good times, primarily by the freshmen but also by the 6-10 junior twins Travis and David Wear and point guard Larry Drew II, a senior transfer who set a UCLA single-season assist record previously held by Pooh Richardson and was voted all-Pac-12.

And when the Bruins rebounded to win at Washington Saturday, they and Howland were conference regular-season champs at 13-5 in league play and 23-8 overall.

"I'm really pleased with our bounce-back," Howland said Tuesday. "There's more of a comfort level about where the program is. But it's all about the next game. You're only as good as your next game."

Or your last games. The Bruins, who will open Pac-12 tournament play Thursday against the winner of No. 8 seed Stanford and No. 9 seed Arizona State, had a strange last week on the road, losing to last-place Washington State before bouncing back against middle-of-the-pack Washington.

"If you look at our team how we played down the stretch, we bounced back from tough defeats," Howland said. "I take full responsibility for how poorly we played against Washington State. Travis Wear had been hurt, and for a two-week period we didn't have any contact at practice. That really weakens you. You play how you practice. (But) we had our best practice of 2013 on Friday in Seattle. That directly correlated to how we played the next day."

This week the Bruins have a chance to make more statements about where they should be seeded in the NCAA tournament, and Muhammad, on his home turf, has another chance to excel.

He comes in as co-Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, first team all-Pac-12, the Bruins' leading scorer (18.3 points per game) and, according to Howland, a lottery pick in the NBA's June draft.

Howland actually jumped the gun on that, Muhammad says.

"He's just looking at the facts, that most things have me going in the lottery," Muhammad says. "But looking at it next year, we can be a really good team. I'm just thinking about our team right now. I'm not saying anything about the NBA until we're done with the season."

Muhammad's freshman success was nearly matched by fellow first-year stars Adams and Anderson. Adams, a burly 6-5, 220-pound shooting guard, is the Bruins' second-leading scorer, averaging 15.2. And Anderson, a 6-9, 235-pounder who can play point guard or defend the post, averages 9.9 points and enters the Pac-12 tourney sixth in the league in rebounding (8.9), fifth in steals (1.8), sixth in assists (3.6). Parker, a 6-9 post player, saw very limited minutes.

"We ended up winning the league, and I feel the freshmen really contributed," Anderson says. "I feel I helped my team a lot, whether it was rebounding or being a second point guard out on the floor. I'm very satisfied."

Anderson made second-team all-Pac-12 and the all-Pac-12 freshman team.

Adams somehow failed to make the all-freshman team, despite being eighth in the Pac-12 in scoring.

"I didn't let that get to me," Adams said. "I'm happy with myself and way I played. ... People expected high things of us (freshmen). They thought we'd go undefeated. We tried to handle it the best way we could."