7 Comments

Watched the highlights and actually more and more convinced ucla can win a championship this year. Pac-12 championship, Pac-12 tourney championship, natty championship… keep making me eat my words cronin. Bona is going to be a great nba player by the way… man he is so big, strong, and fast

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Go Bruins! Good news to wake up to. Yes, it is great seeing Bona grow into the game.

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What really got me was after the slow start offensively for the first few minutes, was how Bona started the momentum on the defensive end then SPRINT DOWN and the offense would work around to reward him, including a slick fake pass into a drop step by Bona. They went away from him in the second half to get the rest of the pistons firing on all cylinders, but putting up what iirc 10p 8 reb in the first half is nothing to scoff at in the slightest for a freshman as raw as Bona.

This defense is only going to clamp down more when Amari is back to the be the first line of defense and allow Clark to run amuck in the passing lanes as the strong safety role he excels in.

Final note, and something you should all take pride in when it happens, is the smiles on all the faces, starters and bench, when they are in the midst of successfully executing the full court press. McClendon has a great smile when he's dogging Utah in the backcourt for an errant throw turnover.

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I wanted to see how Bona would handle Carlson. That would have been a great test and learning tool.

Arizona will present a challenge for him and the team.

Remember, we play everyone twice, so the Bruins cannot get lackadaisical.

I hate Conference Tournaments.

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Jan 14, 2023·edited Jan 14, 2023

I didn't realize that Carlson wasn't ruled out until 10 min before game time, and that's actually really good news to me. During the game, we saw the Bruins offense frequently feeding the ball to Bona in the low post early in the possession, and he made a lot of good passes out of there to the open perimeter shooters and at least once to a cutter, and he also made some really nice low post offensive moves. I assumed that this was something they had game planned for with Carlson out, knowing Bona was going to be a big matchup problem, but the game time scratch of Carlson suggests that this was more of a snap decision by Cronin and staff right before tipoff, and it encourages me that the Bruins offense was able to adjust that quickly and efficiently. I do have some concerns about the overly frequent reliance on Jaquez or Tyger to run isolation, but I'm really happy to see this sort of offensive strategy and flexibility be so effective with what was essentially a spontaneous decision.

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Mick got his act together!

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Lots of upsets so far today. Let's avoid one tonight! Go Bruins!

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