Cronin thankful for his first Pac-12 Tournament experience after wait
Last year, the UCLA men’s basketball team didn’t get to play in any postseason tournaments — Pac-12 or NCAA — due to COVID-19.
“We were on a flight home from Las Vegas (after the conference tournament was called off),” UCLA coach Mick Cronin recollected. “When we landed in Los Angeles, the NCAA Tournament had been canceled ... that’s a 45-minute flight.”
As excited as Cronin and the No. 4-seeded Bruins are to participate in today’s Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas — taking on No. 5 Oregon State at 2:30 p.m. at TMobile Arena — his 18 years of experience as an NCAA men’s basketball coach provide a perspective of thankfulness, even amid unprecedented times like a worldwide pandemic.
The quarterfinal game will be broadcast on Pac-12 Networks.
“It’s easy for me say,” Cronin said when speaking about things creeping back
into normalcy. “I didn’t lose my business like so many others have, 527,000 people lost their lives, and millions of people unemployed.”
Then the perspective: “One of our top donors for UCLA Athletics is ... a bankruptcy lawyer, maybe the biggest firm in the United States ... he’s the busiest human. I hardly speak to the guy, he’s so busy. I don’t want to say, ‘Everything’s great, we’re playing in a tournament,’ but we do have to look at some positives.”
One positive is UCLA (178, 13-6 Pac-12 play) knows what it takes to beat Oregon State (14-12, 10-10). The Bruins took down the Beavers 57-52 on Jan. 30 at Pauley Pavilion, thanks to 16 points and 10 rebound from Cody Riley.
Not so positive is the team’s on a three-game losing skid heading into the conference tournament.
“We didn’t lack effort in the last three games,” Cronin said. “We just weren’t good enough.”
The losses came against the conference’s top teams: third-seeded Colorado, regular-season champion and top-seeded Oregon and second-seeded USC.
“Playing good teams illuminates your weaknesses, and it does force you to improve,” Cronin added. “...everything is a learning experience, but that has to happen in practice and the regular season. A learning experience in the tournament
gets you knocked out.” Scouting the Beavers Oregon State’s biggest threats are Southern California natives Ethan Thompson and Jarod Lucas, who provide different problems for the Bruins’ defense.
Thompson, a senior guard who graduated from Bishop Montgomery, leads the Beavers in scoring at 15.5 points per game.
“Thompson is a great player,” Cronin said. “In the lane, he’s 6-foot-5, he’s a problem because he can pass and score over big people.”
A Los Altos High grad, Lucas averages 12.8 points per game. The sophomore guard does his damage from further out, shooting 39% from beyond the arc this season.
“Lucas can really light you up,” Cronin said. “He’s got our attention. If we didn’t do a good job on him in the first game, we would have lost.”
One of the top concerns heading into today’s game will be the status of UCLA leading scorer Johnny Juzang, who’s pouring in 14.2 points per game this season — good enough for AllPac-12 second-team selection in his first season with the Bruins.
A right ankle tweak in practice late last week kept the Kentucky transfer out of UCLA’s one-point loss to USC on Saturday.
Cronin hopes he’ll be good to go.
“He did some stuff today, he looked better,” Cronin told the media Tuesday. “We still have 48 hours to game time. I’m optimistic for him.”