socaltownie;842260678 said:
It was a very good year. Great that we won conference for the first time in my lifetime. Great for JR and that whole team. But that crown led a lot of guys to miss that the EARLY MM years at Cal had a big flaw - the lack of sheer athletic talent able to play through contact and to create their own shots when in isolation at the end of the clock - skills critical as the season goes along and refs start to "let em play" and when you have 24 hours max to scout and develop a specific game plan,
What alot of people here don't get is the vast upgrade in that skill between, say, Justin, Wallace, Bird and Mathews over JR, Patrick, Joreg and Knezevic. Not taking away anything from those guys...and they all had fun skills....but the were not of the sheer athletic ability and one on one skill of our current starting guards/wings.
Jorge would start for this team. Christopher would play ahead of Kreklow and probably ahead of Wallace. I would love to have Randle on this team, the junior or senior version.
What you call the early MM years were really him taking over what was left of Braun's players and making them far better than they had been, but having to deal with an awful class imbalance and the results of Cal pretty much sucking for a few years before. And yeah, he had to change his approach to recruiting and stop relying on old guys like John before he started improving things. But