PtownBear1 said:
oskidunker said:
I am not sorry for fucla since I experienced the 52 game losing streak but I am curious why they are so bad. I thought they had a lot of 4 star players. Bruin says the talent isn't very good and that their guards are slow.
I'm also curious how they can be that bad. Their 2019 class consisted of only 2 players, but they had 5 top 100 players in the 2018 class. I'm assuming most, if not all, of those players are still there:
https://247sports.com/Season/2018-Basketball/CompositeRecruitRankings/?InstitutionGroup=highschool
For comparison, we had zero in the top 100 and only two (Bradley and Gordon) in the 100-150 range.
RSCI composite has UCLA with 7 players in the top 100. It looks like 4 of them are 5-stars, and 2 are 4-stars, and #96 Jaquez could be either a 4-star or a 3-star, and I'm too lazy to look that up.
This tells me that either the rankings are very inaccurate and optimistic, or the rankings are good, but the players are young and the coaching has not been very effective so far. I believe it is the latter. They do have a coach with previous success. Six of the seven elite players are either freshman or sophomores, and even highly ranked players often take a year or two to develop into good college players.
Many elite players are not coachable to a degree that the team is successful. They are usually strong individual players and a certain amount of teamwork is required, even for teams with elite players. I believe teams with lesser talent are often a little easier to coach, in terms of teamwork.
Actually, Bradley was ranked #73 in the RSCI composite, which seems to be a more realistic ranking in his case, That would be a 4-star ranking. As to Cal, we all have seen what a struggle it has been for Mark Fox to get the players he inherited and the new players to all work together and finally have a little success, and these players are more likely to listen to coaching than the elite players of UCLA. I would not count UCLA out just yet. It may just take Cronin more time to get these kids on the same page than UCLA fans would like. Most fans of any team want success right away, and that is not often the way basketball works with young players.
