UCLA men's basketball team looks to regain shooting touch It started in Colorado on Thursday. The normally dead-eye UCLA freshman guard missed all seven of his shots. Two days later, he missed all four shots against Utah. "That was very unlike me," Alford said. As foreign as it was, he was savvy enough to know, "When you get in a shooting slump, or whatever you want to call it, you want to get out of it as soon as you can." The Bruins may need group therapy for that at the moment. Jordan Adams, UCLA's leading scorer, has more clank than swish in his shot lately. Zach LaVine, a marquee freshman, has been on-again, off-again. David Wear's shooting percentage has gone into a bear-market-like crash. This could make a decent reality show: "When Good Shooters Go Bad." UCLA shot 52% in nonconference play, second nationally, but in the last four games, the Bruins have cooled to 42%. They lost two of the four games, leaving the Bruins (14-4 overall, 3-2 in Pac-12 Conference play) two games behind Cal and Arizona heading into Thursday's game against Stanford (12-5, 3-2) in Pauley Pavilion. Dealing with this can be tricky. Bob Thate, a longtime shooting coach now with the Clippers, said the worst thing a slumping shooter can do is force his shots. "Inside, your body is a little tighter, it throws you off," Thate said. So start with acceptance. The Bruins, Coach Steve Alford said, do not have a problem. In fact, he denied the "S" word on Tuesday. "I don't think we're in any kind of a slump," Alford said. Alford saw the glass as half full in Colorado, praising the Bruins for proving they could win on a night when they shot 39%. Two days later, they proved they could lose when shooting 43% against Utah. "We just had two games on the road, that's not a shooting slump," Alford said. Yet, the Bruins struggled in their last two home games, shooting 40% in a loss to Arizona and 45% in beating Arizona State. Whether four games make a slump can be debated. What is clear is the Bruins have labored to score. "We got in a hurry offensively," Alford said. Because of that, we took more difficult shots.