socaltownie said:
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BTW - your sad saw about the Hawaii game is BEYOND old. We lost that game not because of Rabb and Brown. We lost that because we had to rely upon Chauca - you know a 2 start - to try to run point. It was a disaster. No coaching in the world was going to make up for what he was - a kid without a handle, who couldn't shoot over folks and who couldn't guard folks to save soul. But hey, playing professionally in Manila so there is that.
You KNOW that the team was woeful without Wallace - with the losses coming when he was hurt. We win going away in that game, even without Bird, if Ty was there.
Frankly your underappreciation for that team is really really irritating - but hey , it fits your narrative that all we need to do is run a weave and worship at the god of 1960 basketball.
This will fit your narrative. When the team fails, never criticize the elite player, and blame the team failure on the guy with the lowest recruit ranking and least talent on the team. You make up things that didn't happen, manipulate facts, or just plain lie, to make your point, which is every bit as tiring to me, as my walls of writing on Cal's greatest era is to you.
You are actually going to blame Cal's loss to Hawaii on little Brandon Chauca, the team's least talented player, who played a total of EIGHT MINUTES in the loss to Hawaii? While his much more talented teammates played 192 MINUTES in that game? Give us a break. Do you think we are that stupid?
Cal:
Brown, 5 stars
Rabb, 5 stars
Domingo, 4 stars
Mathews, 3 stars
Singer, 3 stars
Rooks, 3 stars
Moute a Bidias, 3 stars
Okoroh, 2 stars
Chauca, 2 stars
That is an average of 3.3 stars/player
Hawaii:
Jankovic, 3 stars
Valdes, 2 stars
Thomas, 2 stars
Tummala, 1 star
Bobbit, UNRANKED
Smith, UNRANKED
Jovanovic, UNRANKED
Drammeh, UNRANKED
That is an average of 1.0 stars/player
Cal had THREE TIMES the starpower of Hawaii. Cal should have won that game by 20 points, going away, based on your belief that all that is needed to win is to have as much or more talent than your opponents. If Wallace and Bird had played, it would have been FOUR TIMES the starpower of supposedly lowly Hawaii.
Here are the reasons Cal lost, not in any particular order, and none of them is little Brandon Chauca.
1. Cal coaches and players very likely underestimated Hawaii. Hawaii played only one good team in the preseason, #3 Oklahoma, in Hawaii, and lost by 3 points. They were 27-5, 13-3 in the Big West, which is a decent conference. They were regular season champion and had lost two games to Long Beach State, but then turned around and beat them in the final to win the Big West Tournament. They were not chopped liver, despite the low ranking of their talent.
2. Both Wallace and Bird were out with injuries, and when any team loses 2 starters, they will be faced with a big challenge to pull together and make up for the loss of key teammates. I agree that losing Wallace had more effect than losing Bird, but losing both was tough.
3. Jaylen Brown played the worst game of his collegiate career, maybe of his entire life up to that point. I think he was either ill with a flu or something, or he tried to take too much on his shoulders, feeling that he would have to step up to make up for losing Wallace and Bird. He got into early foul trouble and had to sit most of the first half. He came back in the second half, picked up another foul and had to sit. He was hampered by that the whole game. He played only 17 minutes, and really looked out of sorts. He went 1-6 from the field, scored 4 points, got 2 rebounds, no assists, and had SEVEN TURNOVERS. So he did not just become a non-factor, he actually hurt the team with his play.
4. Cal could not contain Hawaii's guards. Bobbitt and Smith penetrated Cal's defense over and over, or shot over them. I thought having Singer on the floor instead of Wallace might help us, as Singer was a better defender than Tyrone, but he got in foul trouble trying to guard Bobbitt and Smith who torched all the Cal guards, for 36 points, while averaging 21 between them during the season.
5. Cal's bigs could not contain Hawaii big Stefan Jankovic, who scored 16 points, which was his season average against lesser competition, while Cal's Ivan Rabb scored 13.
6. Cal shot threes poorly, 0.214. Mathews was 3-8, but the rest of the Cal team was 0-11(Chauca 0-2). They clearly missed Bird.
7. Cal committed 16 turnovers (SEVEN by Brown, only ONE by Chauca), and let Hawaii score 77 points against supposedly one of the country's better defenses. Losing Bird and Wallace was losing perhaps the two least talented defenders of the starting five, and replacing their minutes with Singer and RMB should have helped the defense, but it did not.
8. Cal's point guard for 30 minutes, Sam Singer, did not get a single assist. Cal as a team got only 6 assists, where they had been averaging 13 per game. Wallace, if he had played, averaged 4 assists, so that still would likely have left Cal with only 10, 3 short of their average.
What Cal did well in that game was to control the boards at both ends. Rabb had 12 boards. And Cal held 2-star ranked players Valdes and Thomas, to 17 points between them, while they had been averaging 27 points between them. Mathews went off for 23 points, and Singer scored 12, a total of 35 between them, while they usually averaged 17 between them. In the end, it was Cal's inability to shut down UNRANKED Bobbitt and Smith from doing whatever they wanted, it seemed, and their inability to stop Jankovic inside. Both Bobbitt and Smith were Bay Area boys, one from Oakland and the other from Deer Valley in Antioch, the same school where Marcus Lee played. I wonder why these two boys were unranked, and I wonder if Cal coaches ever knew about them in high school.
On a personal note, I won't be reading or replying to anything else you write on the BI. It is a waste of time for both of us and everyone else. You make a very good argument for recruiting elite players, but you take personal offense at any dissent. Don't you realize that attacking other posters with hyperbole and personal ad hominem attacks just weakens your argument? I started responding to you, because you trashed Lars and the rest of the unranked newcomers and even some veterans. I'm a Cal fan, and those are not just your players, they are my players and every other Cal fan's players. I don't like the way you trash Cal teams, players, and coaches who were before your time, as if Cal history began with you. You want to be a Cal fan, then get with the program, and root for Cal, don't ridicule Cal.
Here is the box score, FYI:
https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/boxscores/2016-03-18-california.html