Postgame Talk: UCLA Plays an Inconsistent Game One Last Time in 67-58 Loss to Tennessee
The Bruins saw their season end due to the familiar bugaboo of inconsistent play.
And so the 2024-2025 season of UCLA Bruins men’s basketball ends in perhaps the most poetic way possible: with some fits of excellent play hampered by boneheaded decisions and a number of disappearing acts from a variety of players. That was never going to be enough to beat a team like Tennessee, and so we got the most obvious of results, a 67-58 defeat to end their tournament run and season.
There will be time to break down the ultimate successes and failures of this team, and what the future may hold, in a postmortem later this week (especially given that the Transfer Portal opens up this Monday), so for now I want to focus on this game, and how UCLA lost. For the first part of the game, the Bruins played some very good basketball. Now, it did help that Eric Dailey Jr. committed two early fouls and ended up sitting out 18 of the 20 minutes in the half, paving the way for Aday Mara to gobble up a ton of minutes and do the thing he has tended to do since February: positively impact the game on both ends of the court. It is hard to say how much those early heavy minutes impacted Mara; Mara was again sick this week, and given how he only saw the court for five minutes in the second half, it is impossible to say whether he had the conditioning given his illness to play out the game. Mara has had the worst luck this season, from the preseason foot injury that limited his conditioning and led to him spending most of the non-conference slate working to get back into shape, to getting mono during the height of his breakout streak in February, to another illness on the eve of the NCAA Tournament. His status for next season will be one to watch.
It should be repeated that Dailey’s early fouls were not a huge loss for the team because he continued his poor play in the last few weeks with one last disappearing act to end the season. Dailey is a very streaky player, and if he isn’t hitting his shots early, then he tends to take himself out of games on both ends, and that’s exactly what happened here. In the second half, with 14 minutes of game time, Dailey only managed two points on 1-5 shooting, and more distressingly did not register a single rebound in the entire second half. The fall of Eric Dailey as this season has progressed has been one of the more puzzling storylines of the season, as a player who spent most of the first half of the year as UCLA’s most important player fell off a cliff in the latter half of the year, but he’s also one of the younger players on the team, so this is something that can hopefully change in time. After all, I thought Tyler Bilodeau had one of his best defensive games of the season and showed off some solid chemistry playing alongside Aday Mara, so development is possible considering how hard Dailey works.
(As a quick piece because I don’t have much for him, I thought Bilodeau played fine, not exceptional but not poorly. He’s miscast on this team in so many ways, but there’s a lot to work with here.)
The bigger loss in the first half was Skyy Clark, who also managed to pick up two quick fouls and ended up only playing three minutes in the first half in total. Clark has grown over the season to become UCLA’s most indispensable guard, and his loss meant more of Dylan Andrews and Sebastian Mack, with a good stint from Trent Perry as well. Andrews played a fairly good defensive half of basketball, but he’s such a negative on offense at this point that the best he was hoping for was to be net-neutral, and at the end of the half, the dam finally burst. Andrews loves to dribble into trouble and immediately pick the ball up, and he kept doing it against Tennessee’s trapping press, leading to the turnover bonanza late in the first half that took what had been a back-and-forth affair into a comfortable seven-point halftime lead for the Volunteers. In the second half, Andrews’s defense also fell off, and if that was the last we see of him in a UCLA uniform, it will be a depressing end for someone who seemed so full of promise just a year ago.
Clark, meanwhile, had a generally solid game once he was finally able to play, leading the team with 18 points on 5-11 shooting. One of the positives late in the season was watching Clark become more comfortable taking a larger volume of shots, and he showed off his scoring ability in this one in the second half, hitting shots from multiple levels and drawing fouls at a reasonable clip while playing some solid defense. If there’s a big takeaway this season beyond the emergence of Mara, it is the growth of Clark into a dependable rotation piece. I also thought Trent Perry played rather well, and he’ll remain as one of the “What if?”s of the season given how he never got a ton of run in his freshman season. Still, this was at least a good finish for him personally, and a lot to grow on going forward.
Kobe Johnson had a poor game in general, mostly because he was not the disruptive force that he has been on defense. This felt like watching him play for Andy Enfield, gambling for steals that weren’t there, getting lazy with his passes and settling for shots rather than looking for something better. Johnson generally gave the Bruins good play but the wing position is where the Bruins will likely look for a major upgrade this offseason.
The second half of this game was reminiscent of the Big Ten Tournament game, with Tennessee hitting a few big shots that completely demoralized UCLA and led to worse rotations on defense and rushed shots on offense. There will be a lot of questions regarding rotations and strategy directed at Cronin, but I think the biggest issue in the micro for this game is fairly simple: this team lacked a true leader who could rally the team and get them to play hard. I want to dig into this a bit during the postmortem, but UCLA’s depth does seem to have hurt them in these situations because there were a ton of good but not great players that were not able to rise to the occasion. Maybe someone like Dailey grows into the role, or an incoming transfer takes on that position, but there was no Tyger Campbell or Jaime Jaquez on this team, and there hasn’t been in a few seasons now.
The attention will naturally turn towards the offseason, but I want to leave with one last thought. If you are judging this season in a vacuum, I don't think you are wrong in thinking this was a subpar or weak season. It’s UCLA, and the expectation is to be competitive at an elite level, and there were too many instances of inconsistent play for this team to reach that level. But if you view this season through the lens of a reset following the disaster that was 2023-2024, then there are a lot of positives to build on going forward, which makes the offseason even more fascinating.
But we’ll talk about all that later. For now, the attention will (rightly) turn towards the women’s team that is still dancing.
Go Bruins.
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Given the inconsistency of this team, last night went about as expected. First off, I feel badly for Dylan Andrews. I know some have no issue criticizing players, especially now that they are getting paid, but I think Andrews puts out maximum effort and is probably much more disappointed in his lack of success this year than anyone on this board. This modern era of hyper-criticism can have serious negative effects on the mental state of modern athletes. I hope Dylan will be okay. I have to say that the season went as expected. My lowered expectations led to much less frustration last night. Heck, I wouldn't have been surprised if we had laid an egg against Utah State. I would assume that Aday Mara is exploring all of his options about now. I think he loves being at UCLA. That being said, he has a business decision to make and in addition to the financial considerations, I'd want to know how Mick Cronin would utilize me in 2025/2026. I've been pretty clear all season long that Mara should have been our Center from early on and that Kyle should have backed him up. Bilodeau should have been the 4. Our attack against a trapping pressure defense is either poorly designed or poorly executed. I don't understand inbounding the ball into the corners or stopping one's dribble just across the center line. It makes no sense. When you have a 7'3" player that is an excellent passer, why not utilize him as a safety valve in the center of the floor? Players can then cut to the basket in attack mode. The women's team often use Lauren Betts in a similar fashion. So, the men's season is over at exactly the time I expected. Tonight, I will be at Pauley Pavilion to watch the women again. They are a lot more entertaining than the men.
Looking at the box score, we were beat in every offensive metric. 30% (7/23) versus 50% (11/22) for 3's; 37% versus 43% overall FG; 78% versus 87% FT; 23 to 30 rebounds. The biggest problem is we do not have a stand out offensive player like Juzang when we made a deep run nor like Lanier who torched us with 4/5 from the 3 yesterday. I understood at the beginning of the season that Bilodeau was suppose to be our Juzang but even when Mara was in and Bilodeau could play the four, he was OK but not great--2/6 from 3 and 1/3 for FT's. Mara is not the answer because he needs to be under the basket to utilize his 7' 3" height advantage to score (3/9)-- unlike a Vlad Goldin who has far better athletic skills and can hit shots from all over the front court including the 3. Maybe Mara can develop a mid range jumper next year but I do not see him being the answer to our lack of offense. Cronin needs to pick up somebody in the Portal to address this problem as he is not going to change his system from defense first and foremost and offense a weak second.
The worry for our ladies is the excessive number of turnovers which has been the case all season and Close does not seem to have the answer.