#797 ASA PLAY ON 8* St Mary’s +2.5 over UCLA, Saturday at 7:10 PM ET - UCLA steps into this game after a physical, down to the wire defensive battle with Akron. The Bruins escaped with a 57-53 win in that game. The Bruins trailed for all but 3 minutes in the 2nd half of that game despite making 4 more three point shots and 4 more FT’s. St Mary’s should come in rested after their whitewashing of the Indiana Hoosiers (our Top Game on Thursday). The Gaels won by 29 points and they were able to spread out their minutes with 12 different players seeing court time. Thursday was St Mary’s first game since March 8th and they are facing a UCLA team playing their 5th game in 10 days. As we wrote on Thursday vs Indiana, the Gaels have size and defend the interior very well which is where UCLA likes to operate. They also won’t be dominated on the boards as St Mary’s ranks 3rd in the nation in defensive rebounding so very few extra possession off the boards for the Bruins. Both defenses are outstanding with STM ranking 9th nationally in efficiency and UCLA 14th. On offense both teams hit their 3 point attempts at 35% but the Gaels are better inside the arc and at the FT line where they make 76% as a team. We have these teams rated basically dead even. The strength of schedules were very close with UCLA a slight edge. Each team went 1-2 vs the #1 seed which resided in their respective conferences (Gonzaga & Arizona). STM was 7-4 SU vs tourney teams and UCLA was 6-4. Our power ratings have UCLA as a 1 point favorite so we’ll take the value on St Mary’s here.