By JEFF EISENBERG, The Press-Enterprise

Just because the Los Angeles Lakers' are off to a perfect 7-0 start this season doesn't mean their execution late in games has been.

They continue to rely heavily on star Kobe Bryant's playmaking abilities in fourth quarters of close games, a tendency that has produced victories but can also make their offense stagnant and predictable.

NEW ORLEANS -- Walk through the doors to the visiting locker room at New Orleans Arena, and it feels like stumbling through a wormhole to the Las Vegas Strip.

Kevin Love is half the man he used to be. And he's proud of it.

Three months after he fought back tears in the locker room after UCLA's season-ending loss to Memphis, Love hardly resembles the doughy big man TV cameras routinely caught hunched over tugging at his shorts late in games.

When it comes to college basketball, Gene Bartow has a strong allegiance to four schools: the East Tennessee State program his son coaches, the Alabama-Birmingham program he built from scratch, the Memphis program he led to the national title game.

And then there's UCLA -- the school whose championship-or-bust mentality all but ran him out of town.

To find the blueprint for suppressing Memphis' quick-strike transition offense, UCLA needs only to hearken back to the first time its defensive brilliance captured the nation's attention.

If Thursday's first-round matchup with powerful UCLA seems unnerving to tiny Mississippi Valley State, perhaps the 16th-seeded Delta Devils can draw inspiration from one of assistant coach George Ivory's most cherished memories.

For those clamoring for the Pac-10 to trade the anonymity of Fox Sports Net for the omnipresence of ESPN, Saturday's UCLA-Arizona telecast may seem like the TV equivalent of fool's gold.

Not long after UCLA's Kevin Love announced he'd spurned his hometown school in favor of one of its fiercest rivals, members of Oregon's notorious student section started plotting their revenge.