UCLA Bruins meet Kanye West, 2 Chainz during workout

(ESPN)

You never know who you’ll meet in Los Angeles.

Just ask UCLA's men's basketball squad.

As the team gathered for its first workout of the summer Monday morning, players gasped when rappers Kanye West and 2 Chainz, who were playing with their group in a private area curtained off from the rest of the gym, walked over to greet them and pose for photos.

West, who is married to social icon Kim Kardashian, is arguably the most popular rapper in the world. And 2 Chainz, whose real name is Tauheed Epps, recently released the album "Pretty Girls Like Trap Music," which ended last week at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 behind Lorde's "Melodrama."

“I think the players were pretty fired up,” UCLA spokesman Alex Timiraos said. “I think they were pretty excited.”

And it all happened by chance.

The Bruins primarily practice at Pauley Pavilion while construction continues on their new practice facility, which is scheduled to open in August.

This week, however, a Nickelodeon event has locked up Pauley, so the team ventured to the nearby Wooden Center, an auxiliary gym where West and 2 Chainz played with a private party Monday morning. Per Timiraos, a UCLA assistant broke the ice and asked West and 2 Chainz if they’d talk to the players.

On Instagram, 2 Chainz, who averaged 2.8 points per game for Alabama State in the mid-1990s, thanked UCLA men’s basketball “for letting me and [Kanye] ball out at the court today.”

But some affiliated with the program (jokingly) weren’t thrilled with the interaction.

Ex-Bruin Bryce Alford, who went undrafted but signed with the Golden State Warriors to play on their summer league team, tweeted a photo of his father, Steve Alford, with West and joked that he worries the encounter might go to the UCLA coach's head.

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