TheSouseFamily said:
Kingsley brought value to the team. It was just entirely on the defensive end. Offensively, he really only contributed on the boards but defensively, it was a different story. By some metrics, he was our best defensive player and that's often overlooked.
Thanks. Singer had some tools and some moments. He seemed to lack consistent confidence, and that is really important at the top D1 levels. Do you remember in 2014, Singer's 8 assists leading Cal to a blowout win over #23 Syracuse in Madison Square Garden? He had a really good game on both ends vs Hawaii in the NCAA in 2016, a game which Cal should have won, even with Wallace and Bird down with injuries. Rooks also had one of his best games that day. Unfortunately, Cal's big star, Jaylen Brown had the worst game of his Cal career, fouling out with 4 points. A lot of Singer's problem of reaching his potential was that he played with too many players who had to have the ball in their hands to do anything positive. And a coach who encouraged their one-on-one play. Rooks was not a stiff out there. He was slow and not athletic, but he could not be left alone, because he could catch a ball and score. He rebounded and scored better than his teammate, Okoroh, with KO being the better defender. Still they both were 7 feet tall, with long arms, and were a presence that could not be ignored. Put those two on last year's Cal team, and you win a few more games, and overall, the defense and rebounding would have been a little better. As to cardio, take care of your heart, even if it means not taking Cal BB too seriously.socaltownie said:+1. When Sam and Rooks could do what they could do it was good. When they were asked to start against top level Pac-12 talent it was....well....bad for my cardio health.SFCityBear said:I guess it all depends on what you and I mean by "very good player". I meant that they were very good players to start a team with. Singer had his deficiencies as we know, mostly shooting the ball. After a short time, he became the best perimeter defender that Cuonzo had, IMO, and that probably began with Monty teaching him some fundamentals. He was a solid player for Cal on 4 winning teams, and in his first year with Cuonzo, he logged the 5th most minutes on the floor. In the following two years, he was the team's 6th man in terms of minutes played. You could trust him to take care of the ball, and run offense. Who would your rather have as a player to start your first team at Cal with, Monty's recruit, Singer, or Cuonzo's recruit, Coleman? Sam was not a player you build a team around, but a good role player off the bench.OaktownBear said:SF - I agreed with a lot of your post and pretty much agreed with the overall points you were making as you could tell from my later post, but saying that Monty left Cuonzo with "SIX VERY GOOD PLAYERS" (and putting it in all caps) was an oversell. Calling Sam Singer a very good player was an oversell and there is no way that you could put Rooks in that category. I would definitely say that Monty left a solid core with 4 good players, a decent player and a serviceable player with size to start a rotation. And no question Monty left Cuonzo a lot more than Cuonzo left Wyking.SFCityBear said:Sorry you couldn't. That is my fault. I described Cuozo's first year, and described what Cuonzo's first recruits, Okoroh, Chauca and transfer Tarwater had done, IN THAT FIRST YEAR, which was not much. In the same paragraph, I mentioned that at the end of that first year, Kravish would graduate, but he would be replaced in the roster by Rooks in that second year of Cuonzo, and Rooks was another player passed on to Cuonzo by Montgomery. When I said Rooks was a good player, it was what I would have described him as at that time, right before Cuonzo's second season began. An improved KO started 17 games and Rooks 10 that year, but Rooks played almost twice the minutes as KO, so I think Rooks was still the better player at that point. Not a lot to choose between them. I imagine Cuonzo was happy to have Rooks. I was not comparing the two players but we can do that:Civil Bear said:SFCityBear said:With all due respect, this is a lot of hooey. We were not a "very solid program" at all before Wyking took over. Cuonzo Martin had wrecked the Cal program, and he got out in the nick of time, so he would not be blamed for where it was headed. Yes, Cal won 18, 23, and 21 games under him. But look at what he started with: SIX VERY GOOD PLAYERS all turned over to him by Mike Montgomery. Jabari Bird, Tyrone Wallace, Jordan Mathews, David Kravish, Rooks, and Sam Singer. Martin brought in two recruits, Okoroh and Chauca, plus transfer Tarwater. Okoroh contributed very little at all, Tarwater slightly more, and Chauca contributed NOTHING. That team was successful entirely due to Montgomery's recruiting. And the bonus was that only one of those players, Kravish, would graduate, but he would be replaced by another good player, Kameron Rooks, also a Montgomery recruit returning from missing a season with injury. So for his second year, Martin had a very good nucleus to work with.socaliganbear said:
The thing that stands out to me about Wyking's statement is how royally CAL (not Wyking) effed the program. Everyone from the Chancellor, Mike Williams, down to the associate ADs that oversee it, dropped the ball to say the least. "Rebuilding a program is never easy".
The three years prior to Wyking's tenure, Cal won 18, 23, and 21 games respectively. What happened immediately after shouldn't have happened. We were not placed on sanctions. We did not have a massive recruiting or academic scandal looming over us. We were not rotting at the core. We had underperformed, sure, but we were a very solid program. This shouldn't have been a complete and total tear down. With where we are now, you'd think we're recovering from USC or Ole Miss like NCAA scandals.
Believe it or not, I've moved on. But man... the people in charge of the program, and by extension, our brand, really effed us.
Martin turned over no such roster and program to Wyking Jones. Martin's next recruits were fabulously highly ranked, Rabb and Brown, enabling to him to add them to Montgomery's nucleus, and the team was even better. Tarwater graduated, so Martin signed a transfer who was a very highly rated recruit in Stephen Domingo, who played two seasons, and was nearly a complete bust. He also signed Roman Davis, who redshirted, but became a three year bust. The team struggled, and underperformed in the early season, and put things together at the end but injuries to two of Cal's lesser stars, Bird and Wallace, doomed the team to a first round loss in the NCAA. The team still had five good players, including Rabb and Brown, and should have been able to beat Hawaii easily, but failed.
That was the start of things beginning to unravel for Martin and the Cal program. Brown left for the NBA as expected. Tyrone Wallace graduated, and Jordan Mathews and Martin did not see eye to eye, I believe, and Mathews transferred to Gonzaga. Rabb decided to stay on for another season. Martin did sign a good recruit in Charlie Moore, a very erratic unranked Don Coleman, and a good grad transfer in Grant Mullins, along with transfer Marcus Lee for the future. The team did alright. However, Martin had run out of tricks. He had failed more than any Cal coach on his way out to having planned his roster to have a mix of underclassmen and upperclassmen for the future. Bird, Singer, Mullins, Domingo, and RMB would all graduate at the same time. His recruiting, except for the big stars, Rabb and Brown, plus Moore, was abysmal. He would have had Okoroh, Rooks, Lee, Moore, Coleman and Davis coming back. But Moore's father already was ill, and Moore transferred. Rooks transferred to be with his family after the death of his father. No one knows if they would have stayed for Cuonzo, but even if they had, the team would have struggled to play .500, IMO. Maybe Baker would have stayed, but he has been injured and missed a lot of games in Kentucky, so maybe he would have been injured at Cal as well.
I want to give Martin the benefit of the doubt, and just say he did not plan his recruiting well for the future, or too many of his recruits did not deliver, but the cynic in me thinks he might have planned his exit all along. He started with Montgomery's best recruiting class ever, 6 good players, and rode that for a year, until he could sign Brown and Rabb, thus solidifying his rep as a master recruiter. I think if Rabb had left as expected, Cuonzo's 2016-17 team would not have won 20 games. Not even close. Martin over three years brought in 3 good recruits, Rabb, Brown, and Moore, and two good transfers, Mullins and Lee. The bad thing about them was only one, Rabb, played longer than one year for Cal.
It was Montgomery who built Cal into a competitive program (with help from the roster left to him by Ben Braun). And it was Cuonzo Martin who broke it down, did a nearly complete teardown. He left Jones with a roster of 4 players, including Davis, who is not much of a player yet. Coleman would be a major challenge under any coach. Two were seniors. Martin left the next coach only Davis for his second season. Contrast that with the roster that Ben Braun left for Montgomery: Juniors Randle, Christopher, Theo, Boykin, Soph Kamp, Frosh Amok, Seeley, and Max Zhang. Two seasons later, Cal wins the PAC10 title with these players. Compared with that, Martin didn't leave himself or Wyking much of anything for 2017 and 2018.
Sorry, I couldn't get past Rooks was very good but Okoroh contributed very little. Kudos to those of you that could.
Here are KO's per game stats in year 2015: 2pts, 2rebs, 1blk
2016:
KO: 2 pts, 2 rebs, 1 blk
Rooks: 4 pts, 5rebs, 1 blk
Cal career:
KO: 3.5pts, 4rebs, 2blks, 0.463FG%
Rooks: 5pts, 5rebs, 1blk, 0.541FG%
I can understand your point about Rooks. However, he was a solid player, not a total stiff, and a little better than Okoroh when each of them arrived on Cuonzo's roster. He was another player you don't build a team around, but a steady player off the bench. Neither Rooks nor Okoroh was a very good player, but both improved each year over their first 3 years at Cal. He did help Cuonzo by being available to start playing in Cuonzo's 2nd year after Kravish had graduated. He was the 7th man in Cuonzo's rotation in terms of minutes in both 2016 and 2017.
Maybe that is what I meant by very good player. High up in the rotation in minutes played for some good 20-win teams, and both Singer and Rooks became those kind of players.
calumnus said:TheSouseFamily said:
Kingsley brought value to the team. It was just entirely on the defensive end. Offensively, he really only contributed on the boards but defensively, it was a different story. By some metrics, he was our best defensive player and that's often overlooked.
I'd love to have another Kingsley or Thurman on this team.
I hope you weren't responding to my comment about Kingsley contributing very little, because that was just in reference to his contribution in his freshman year. And he would have contributed more if the coach had seen his way to play him more minutes. I wanted to see him more. It was evident the first time I saw him that he had the knack of blocking shots, the intuition to see when and how to do it, and the skill to do it. He improved each year of his first three years. I agree with all you said. I also thought he had pretty good passing skills, and Cuonzo never took advantage of that. Wyking Jones made a big mistake with his full court press, and trying to run all the time, because Kingsley is not a fast player. A good coach recruits players to fit his system, and if he does not have them, he tailors his system to fit the players on his roster. He had to play Kingsley, for the sake of defense alone, because without him on the floor, Cal had no defense. He was injured some of the time, but the rest of the time he needed to be on the floor as much as possible, IMO.TheSouseFamily said:
Kingsley brought value to the team. It was just entirely on the defensive end. Offensively, he really only contributed on the boards but defensively, it was a different story. By some metrics, he was our best defensive player and that's often overlooked.
I'm not sure I understand what you think Jones should have done differently on that score. If Cal calls me up and offers guaranteed $5M for this job, I'm taking it. Too bad for the rest of you. Pretty good for me. Cal failing to recognize that he wasn't capable was the problem.Bear19 said:
Like many egocentric folks, Jones refused to recognize that he just was not capable of leading a P-5 MBB team. That Cal refused to see the obvious truth is another notch in the failed regime belt of Mike Williams. Enough of the obvious.
Knowlton has an opportunity to get the program back on track. No room for error on this critical hire decision.
Really now. How do you know Jones was egocentric, as you imply? Do you have evidence? Do you know any applicant for a job who does not walk into his interview, and when asked, "Do you think you can do this job?" answers, "Yes"?Bear19 said:
Like many egocentric folks, Jones refused to recognize that he just was not capable of leading a P-5 MBB team. That Cal refused to see the obvious truth is another notch in the failed regime belt of Mike Williams. Enough of the obvious.
Knowlton has an opportunity to get the program back on track. No room for error on this critical hire decision.
