California came into Saturday’s contest at Pauley Pavilion in the midst of a 19-game losing streak in Pac-12 contests.
With the Golden Bears under new direction with first-year head coach Mark Madsen, winless away from Haas Pavilion and with losses in five of their last six games, this appeared to be a bounce-back opportunity for a struggling UCLA men’s basketball team.
Instead, the Bruins proceeded to do things that haven’t been seen in Westwood in more than 20 years — and they weren’t good things.
UCLA’s 66-57 loss to Cal, coupled with a 59-53 loss to Stanford earlier in the week, marked the first time since 2004-05 that the program has been swept by the Bay Area schools.
The Bruins have lost seven of their last eight games, including three in a row, and four consecutive games at Pauley Pavilion for the first time since the 2002-03 season — the last under former head coach Steve Lavin.
Like that UCLA team, these Bruins face a future without much hope for a postseason future, barring a miraculous run at the Pac-12 tournament for the automatic NCAA tournament bid in March. UCLA has gone from defending Pac-12 champions to tied with Cal for last place in the conference, sitting at 6-9 overall and 1-3 in the Pac-12.
A mostly inexperienced roster consisting of eight newcomers, including seven freshmen, have struggled to adjust to the tough-love methods of head coach Mick Cronin, who was still addressing his team in the locker room after the loss when he sent assistant coach Rod Palmer in his place for the postgame press conference.
Players were not made available to talk with reporters, either.
“You have to play harder if you want a different result,” Palmer said. “You have to do things different if you want a different result and we haven’t been doing those different things. We’ve been stressing it in practice but for some reason, whatever it is — it could be youth, it could be inexperience — we’re just not getting the job done.”
Palmer said getting the message across to a younger team, as opposed to having the likes of Jaime Jaquez Jr., Tyger Campbell and David Singleton for the past few seasons, is a tougher task.
“It’s a little difficult. You know, their heads are a little harder,” Palmer said. “In high school or wherever they’ve come from, they haven’t had to experience the things that they’re experiencing now. You know, things are hard, college basketball is hard for a freshman coming in, playing a lot of minutes against 23-, 24-, 25-year-old guys. It’s hard but coach Cronin is still preaching the same message. But is it getting through the way he wants it to? No. But in time it will.”
