Bruins are No. 1, but TV tunes them out

The undefeated UCLA’s men’s basketball team, ranked first in the country in the Associated Press writers’ poll and the ESPN/USA Today coaches’ poll, plays its first Pacific 10 Conference road game Thursday against Oregon State and the game won’t be televised.

Not in Los Angeles, not in Corvallis, Ore., not even via streaming Internet. There will be no TV cameras in Gill Coliseum.

“That’s a surprise to me,” Coach Ben Howland said Tuesday after the Bruins (13-0, 2-0) had finished a 2 1/2 -hour practice at Pauley Pavilion. “I would have expected us to be on television.”

According to UCLA spokesman Marc Dellins, the game between seventh-ranked Arizona and No. 24 Washington at 7:30 p.m. was chosen by Fox Sports, which has the Pac-10 television contract, as a national TV game.

Dellins said that when UCLA approached Fox about getting a waiver to televise the Bruins, Fox declined. And when UCLA approached Oregon State about moving the game from 7 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., so as not to conflict with Fox’s national game, Oregon State declined.

Howland said he had no idea the game wasn’t going to be televised.

“That’s disappointing,” he said. “We should get that changed.”

Three other UCLA games -- California at Pauley Pavilion on Feb. 22, UCLA at Washington State on March 1, and UCLA at Washington on March 3 -- are listed on the television schedule as “wild-card” games, meaning Fox has until 12 days before each to decide what will be televised.

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Starting forward Josh Shipp, who sat out the last 10 minutes of Sunday’s victory over Washington because of leg cramps, said he felt fine after Tuesday’s practice.

Shipp had sprained his right ankle at practice a week ago. That injury kept him from practicing and led, Howland said, to a lack of perfect conditioning, which in turn led to the cramping.

“I’m fine now,” Shipp said. “The ankle is fine too.”

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Center Lorenzo Mata practiced with the team but left immediately afterward to join his family in mourning the death of a friend. Mata will be back at practice Wednesday, Howland said.

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UCLA received all 31 of the first-place votes in the coaches’ poll and 71 of the 72 first-place votes in the AP poll, where John Kaltefleiter of the Macon Telegraph in Macon, Ga., voted North Carolina first and UCLA second.

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The Bruins were 8-2 on the road last year when they went to the NCAA championship game. They play their first true road games this week in Oregon and Arron Afflalo, who leads UCLA in scoring, said he and his teammates succeed away from home because, “We as a team like each other, and when we’re away from home it’s all about basketball.”

Sophomore Michael Roll agreed. “The road is always fun,” he said. “The team is together as a group, just doing what we love.”

diane.pucin@latimes.com