To say that the UCLA men’s basketball team is in an unusual position for the middle of February would be a tremendous understatement.

With six games remaining in the regular season, a time in which the UCLA teams of the past have aimed to put themselves in position to receive a top bid in the NCAA Tournament, this year’s Bruins (11-13, 6-6, Pac-10) are solely concerned with gaining an advantageous seed in the Pac-10 Tournament.

Sitting in sixth place, two and a half games behind first-place Cal, the Bruins understand that their greatest chance to make the Big Dance is to win the conference tournament.

Therefore, the emphasis on the final three weeks of the season is simple: Get as high of a seed in the Pac-10 Tournament as possible in order to ease the task of winning it all.

That six-game stretch begins tonight against Washington State (15-10, 5-8) in Pullman, Wash. – a place where the Bruins have won the previous 16 games – and against Washington on Saturday in Seattle, a place where the Bruins have won just once under coach Ben Howland.

“We know that it’s going to come down to the Pac-10 Tournament so it’s kind of a blessing in disguise,” redshirt junior point guard Mustafa Abdul-Hamid said. “All this is a learning experience, all this is about getting better and we’re going to put it on the line when it counts.”

At Tuesday’s weekly press conference, senior guard Michael Roll addressed a question which asked if there is less pressure on the team to win in these final Pac-10 games with the knowledge that the conference tournament would likely be the one to determine their fate.

“Definitely say there is more importance just because we need to pick up some more momentum just to be feeling good coming into the Pac-10 Tournament because we’re going to have to win three games just to get into the NCAA Tournament,” Roll said. “For some of us, it’s our last game. I definitely want to start playing better than we have been and push that extra 110 percent these last six games.”

The Bruins hope that this weekend is an improvement from last Sunday, when the UCLA fell to rival USC 68-64 in a game in which the Bruins committed 20 turnovers. When looking back at the tape, Howland said he felt that the turnovers are one of the main things holding the Bruins back.

“We’ve got to take better care of the basketball,” Howland said. “You go back and watch the game against USC from Sunday night, our half-court defense was pretty decent. They scored a lot of points off of our turnovers. The turnovers have plagued us.”

Abdul-Hamid put it in slightly different terms.

“They say the basketball is the best girlfriend you ever had so you better treat her right,” Abdul-Hamid said. “And we haven’t been doing that lately.”

A point of emphasis against the Cougars tonight will be locking down both sophomore guard Klay Thompson and freshman guard Reggie Moore.

In the Bruins’ first game against the Cougars, the team limited Thompson – the Pac-10’s second-leading scorer – to 13 points, yet allowed Moore to take six three-pointers on the way to 24 points.

“We’ve done that a lot this year,” freshman forward Tyler Honeycutt said. “We put our main focus on their best players and we tend to usually lock up their best players. Then somebody else has their best game against us or their career-high because we didn’t really expect that. We knew he was a great player, a great freshman but we really didn’t expect the numbers he put up.”