Pyperkub wrote: Thu Jan 09, 2025 12:39 pm
ImLawBoy wrote: Wed Jan 08, 2025 4:55 pm
Michigan won a big one at UCLA last night (which I couldn't watch because it was on Peacock). Big first half lead, blew it and were behind in the second half, recovered and pulled away to win by 19. Not bad for a road game against a ranked team, particularly given how good UCLA is at forcing turnovers and how many turnovers Michigan gives.
The real story coming out of it, though, is Mick Cronin's embarrassing post game press conference where he threw everyone but himself under the bus. He called out players by name as soft and said he was disappointed in his players and staff. I guess he's trying it as a motivational tactic, but is that really the message you want to send to recruits? Brian Kelly thought it was over the top.
Yeah. Nice win for you. Cronin has done this before - after a not very good UCLA team got blown out at Utah last year (in a very similar fashion to Tuesday's game - giving up a ton of 3s), he did the same thing and UCLA played some of its best basketball over the next few weeks. But I have my doubts as to whether it will work again. Maybe.
Either way, even tho we did ok on the offensive end v. Michigan (for that one stretch to get back in the game, at least), I've grown tired of Cronin and find his offenses impossible to watch, and have to have the games on DVR so I can fast forward through the long and interminable stretches we have multiple times per game where we just can't score, and usually never even threaten to. It's also that while he can win games that way, it's not a recipe for tourney success - it leaves you with a very hard ceiling of the sweet 16 at best. In his FF run with UCLA, the defense was great, but there was fantastic shotmaking and offensive execution, and we haven't seen much of that since. Even in the 2 Sweet 16 runs after that, the offense wasn't anywhere near what it needs to contend.
Since writing this, the UCLA Offense has really turned it around, and with a lot of room to grow. We're finally attacking defenses rather than just hoping for an opening. Getting Aday Mara involved instead of sitting on the bench has been crucial to the offense scoring over 16 points per game higher (as has a nice stretch of games on the West Coast - whatever UCLA was doing for the road trips to Md/Rutgers/Neb didn't work), and he's having a huge impact defensively when he's in too.
Big game against Michigan St (undefeated in the B1G thus far, tho the schedule has missed some big teams) next up for UCLA on Tuesday after demolishing #16 Oregon in Pauley last night.
Side note, the B1G basketball schedule is so very different from the Pac 12 - we used to play almost exclusively Thu/Sat games conference wide (yeah, you'd have 1-2 wed/fri/sun games sprinkled in), but apparently the B1G has a rule for 2 full days off between games, so the games are all over the map, with only a handful of games being played per day, rather than most of the conference in action on a particular day, and we frequently don't even have a game on the weekend like this week - I expect that last is so that all of the TV partners can keep a steady stream of games, but it's still really weird not just looking forward to the games on particular nights, and only once in awhile needing to be prepared for a different day.
