The Hawaii men’s basketball team spent Monday’s practice focusing on itself, its standard procedure.

In last week’s home games, it was impossible not to focus on the team’s subpar outside shooting.

UH was a combined 5-for-30 (16.7 percent) on 3-pointers in a 75-64 loss to UC Santa Barbara on Thursday and a 69-60 victory over Cal Poly on Saturday, completing a 2-2 split of its two-week, four-game homestand.

In the latter game, the fourth-place Rainbow Warriors (16-7, 5-4 Big West) realized they didn’t need to force the issue from outside. Instead, they fed forward Isaac Fotu, who feasted with 26 points on 10-for-13 shooting. Frontcourt mate Christian Standhardinger cleaned up much of the rest with 18 points and 12 rebounds.

Still, UH dropped to 28.4 percent on 3s in nine conference games — last in the league.

"You know, 20-some-odd games we shot the ball really well," UH coach Gib Arnold said. "But we don’t need to rely on our 3-pointers to win. That’s the thing I want to get to, where when they’re falling maybe we really get it going. But the first time they weren’t falling (to UCSB), we weren’t good inside. We didn’t get the ball inside, and lost. The second night they weren’t falling, but we were getting the ball inside. So we gotta know our strengths are inside. We gotta go inside first and the outside shots I think will fall even more so when they start doubling down on Fotu and Christian."

UH departs this afternoon for two games in the greater Los Angeles area. The ‘Bows play at UC Riverside (8-15, 3-6) on Thursday and at Cal State Fullerton (7-15, 2-6) on Saturday.

The recent shooting woes are a result of simultaneous slumps from UH’s three primary shooters — point guard Keith Shamburger, shooting guard Garrett Nevels and small forward Brandon Spearman.

Fotu isn’t concerned. He’s commanded double teams almost constantly in league play and has made large strides in finding the open man. If he decides to take it himself, it’s also usually been the right play — he’s shooting north of 65 percent in league play.

"We gotta get it inside first. If it goes in to me or Christian, we make sure it goes out again," he said. "I think our chances of hitting shots go up when it goes inside first, so that’s what we’ve tried to do, establish inside first and outside will come I think."

Nevels has been the most reliable at nearly 43 percent from deep on the season, third in the Big West. But he had a streak of 10 straight games in double figures snapped against UCSB, and he was 1-for-8 from 3 in the past two games.

The junior college transfer has rarely forced the issue with contested shots, and he doesn’t figure to start doing so now.

"I’m going to just find my open spots and just keep playing the game how it comes," Nevels said. "Fotu shot 10-for-13 (last game), so I mean, if we got somebody like that, shoot, I don’t need to be shooting a lot of 3s. We’re efficient in our 2-point field goals, so we should just keep taking more of those."

Since winning Big West player of the week after helping the ‘Bows to a 2-0 road trip at UC Davis and UC Irvine, Shamburger has shot 2-for-19 (10.5 percent) on 3s and 5-for-31 (16.1 percent) from the field overall. However, his assist-to-turnover numbers were very strong over that same span, a 5-to-1 ratio.

Spearman is 2-for-14 on 3s in the past three games.

UH-UCSB game on ESPNU

Hawaii’s final regular-season road game at UC Santa Barbara on March 6 at 4 p.m. Hawaii time has been picked up for television coverage on ESPNU, UH announced Monday.