Postgame Talk: Another Lost Game for UCLA Against Rutgers as Roster Construction Failures Shine Bright

The 75-68 loss to the Scarlet Knights could be boiled down to Rutgers having two NBA-level players, but the UCLA defense has disappeared since Big Ten play began in earnest.

Skyy Clark (Photo credit: @UCLAMBB)

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I’m going to make this one pretty short, mostly because I stuck around at work to watch the end of this game and I would like to go home now (3:30 tip-offs are a scourge on this world).

UCLA lost this game at a few different moments. You can say they lost it at the start of the second half when Rutgers’s NBA-level combination of Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey decided to take over the game and the Bruins had no answer. You can say it was lost a little earlier when Dylan Andrews was too sick to provide meaningful minutes, depriving the Bruins of their only guard capable of good defensive play on the perimeter. You could even point to earlier in the season when Aday Mara and William Kyle III could not see the court against subpar opponents, depriving them of crucial minutes with which to develop into playable depth options in the meat of conference play.

I would instead point even further back to the construction of this roster as to why UCLA lost this game to Rutgers by the final score of 75-68. This is a flawed roster built with some fundamental misunderstandings of modern basketball. Let’s start with a few things:

• Tyler Bilodeau is not a five, and the insistence that he could play a majority of his minutes as an unathletic, undersized five is perhaps the biggest flaw on this roster. This game felt like the nadir of the experiment, as Bilodeau struggled to guard against top-level talent on Rutgers defensively, and he was unable to take advantage of mismatches on the opposite end to at least even it out. Bilodeau works best as a stretch four, able to take advantage of other power forwards with his range without having to bang around inside, and asking him to fill that role is an awful misuse of the talent at hand.

• Further to that point, I would like to make a grand statement about college basketball in 2024-2025: the game is more guard-centric than ever. That is not to say you cannot have excellent interior options - after all, we did just watch Michigan take advantage of UCLA with its size - but even on that team Danny Wolf is just a tall guard. You have to have guards who can consistently break down a defense, and the Bruins are currently lacking that. I understand that some readers may have read that and started pointing frantically at Sebastian Mack, but his car-crash style of offense is too inconsistent to be relied upon (not to mention his inability to play good defense), and Skyy Clark is nowhere near athletic enough to compensate for his lack of size. Dylan Andrews is by far the best option on the team to take over and be a score-first option, but the Cronin offense is too focused on getting the ball to Bilodeau that it has stifled him and created the player we’ve seen this year.

• The lack of a true post-player who can play consistent minutes remains a problem. My assumption is that the staff believed William Kyle III was much further along in his development than he has proven to be, but between him and Aday Mara, UCLA is incapable of even getting to 20 minutes combined. Mara, for all of his size, is just not ready for the physicality of the Big Ten, and his minutes in this game were not great by any stretch of the imagination. But, again, it would have been nice to give him more minutes much earlier in the season to develop him.

All of this leads to the situation that we had in this game. With Andrews being too sick to provide any meaningful minutes, UCLA was forced into a suboptimal guard rotation that featured too much Skyy Clark and Sebastian Mack. Rutgers clearly keyed in on Clark defensively and threw him into actions alongside Bilodeau whenever possible. Clark ended up with the worst defensive metrics of anyone on the team, and given how little he is contributing on the offensive end, it should be a very loud question as to why Mick Cronin continues to play him so much instead of giving Trent Perry more minutes (or at least trying Dominick Harris, even if the early results have not been good).

Sebastian Mack was more efficient on offense, but he ended up as a net neutral because of his poor defense. At the end of the game with the Bruins down three with under a minute left, Mack got lazy and did not react to his guy making a cut to the outside. He followed up that first mistake by trying to blow up the screen and then called out for William Kyle III to rotate much too late. The Rutgers player was able to easily get past an out-of-position Kyle along the baseline and make a layup to essentially ice the game. I’ve gotten to the point where I think Mack might be Cronin’s version of Reeves Nelson (without the personality issues, of course), in that he is a talented but flawed player who is indicative of the general failings of the roster itself.

As I said, this felt like the natural endpoint of the Tyler Bilodeau as a five experiment. Bilodeau ended up going 0-7 from the field in this game, and while he somehow ended up with a +/- of zero, the advanced stats are much more unkind. My hunch is that Cronin believes he can get a poor man’s version of Jaime Jaquez from Bilodeau, but it ignores that 1) despite the “old man game”, Jaquez is incredibly athletic which is why he’s able to stick in the NBA, and 2) Jaquez was never asked to go against opposing bigs on a regular basis. Jaquez was always paired with an actual big, from Cody Riley and Jalen Hill early to Adem Bona and Kenny Nwuba late. If Bilodeau is on this team and paired with a real post combination, I think he would have an excellent offensive year and have his defensive struggles covered for much easier. In fact, at this point I’d like to see Bilodeau see the court with Mara/Kyle just to get some ideas for next year.

Were there things to build on from this game? Sure. Kobe Johnson continues to look like he’s things out on the offensive end, and if he can cut down on the silly fouls 80 feet from the basket, he could be a real force. Eric Dailey Jr. continues to do all the little things right and will pretty easily step into the starting three role next year when Johnson and Stefanovic are gone. Trent Perry continues to look more comfortable in increased minutes, which again just makes me ask why he wasn’t given a ton of the nonconference slate to do this.

And then one final thought for the road: I don’t think this is a bad team. I think it is impossible for a bad team to have won the games they did early in the season, especially against Oregon and Gonzaga. But I do think this is a flawed team, one that seems ill-designed for the style of play in the Big Ten. Maybe it should not be shocking that UCLA is struggling in its new league with a roster that would have competed quite well for the Pac-12 last year. Or maybe it’s not shocking that a conference that has not won a national championship in basketball since 2000 has seemingly encouraged a style of play that leaves its teams battered and bruised. And maybe this team really is just a reawakened Dylan Andrews away from looking elite again. Who can say?

I’m not writing them off just yet, but only time will tell.

Go Bruins.

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