UCLA Men's Basketball 2025 Post-Mortem Part 1: What Does Success Look Like Anymore?
In this first part looking back over the UCLA season, we'll also look at the offensive and defensive metrics for this season, plus take a closer look at UCLA's NIL and Portal strategy.
I always knew I was going to do a post-mortem on this UCLA basketball season. I did it last year, and I like the opportunity to dive deeper into topics and discussions that I don’t have as much time for during the season. The post-game thread for the Bruins’ NCAA Tournament exit has only heightened my need to provide you all more content, and I was very excited to get to this article.
Except then real-life happened, and by the time I sat down to start writing this article, the transfer portal had opened and the conversation surrounding next year had drastically changed. Things I hinted at in previous post-games, like Dylan Andrews transferring out of the program, have already taken place. Such is life when blogging is not your full-time job and the transfer portal opens up the same week you have to conduct parent-teacher conferences.
So I’ll say this up front: this Part I will focus mainly on the past season, trying to break down what went right, what went wrong, and where our perception diverged from reality. And I think there is no better place to start than with a simple question:
What does success look like for UCLA in 2025?
Starting with the existential stuff here.
I’m going to spoil this section early and say that I don’t know if this question has a perfect answer anymore. Different people are going to have different answers to this question, and I am unwilling to say that any of those opinions are right or wrong. There are people who will look at a season where the Bruins never reached elite status and failed to make it out of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament as a failed season, while others will look at a UCLA team that finished fourth in their new conference and notched huge wins over Gonzaga, Arizona, Michigan State, Oregon, and Wisconsin as a successful season, or at the very least a good building block for 2025.
The answer is probably somewhere closer to the middle. Let me start by bringing back my preseason expectations from the season preview:
Win one of the three marquee non-conference games with Arizona, North Carolina, and Gonzaga.
Top 50 offense and defense per KenPom.
Top Four ranking in the Big Ten.
Top four seed line in the tournament, get to the Sweet 16.
Those were some baseline expectations, and by those initial standards UCLA did most of the things required of a successful season. At the same time, the way that UCLA accomplished these expectations left a lot to be desired. To wit:
The team won two of those three marquee games, with the one loss coming against the weakest of the three opponents in North Carolina. But at the same time, the Bruins also lost a pretty uncompetitive game to New Mexico to start the year, so there’s only so many positive feelings you can take from this result.
Maybe the most unambiguous success, UCLA finished 37th in offensive efficiency and 15th in defensive efficiency. But as I’ll dig into later, there are some underlying numbers here that make these results more questionable on the defensive end.
UCLA earned a #4 seed in the Big Ten Tournament, but that was thanks to winning a tiebreaker scenario with Purdue and Wisconsin as all three teams tied for fourth. UCLA did have a victory over Wisconsin in the regular season while they lost to Purdue, and then ultimately lost to Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament. If you were trying to rank the Big Ten teams based on their performance, this UCLA team was around 6th in the conference, only sitting above Oregon because I watched them demolish the Ducks at home after beating them on the road.
UCLA did not hit this expectation at all. There was a moment following the Gonzaga win where it looked like the Bruins had the inside track to a protected seed out west, but the month of January essentially wiped that dream out, and in the end, none of the big West Coast programs got a protected seed in the west.
If that reads like a mixed bag of success and failures, that’s because it was. For every victory over Arizona, there was a loss to Minnesota. For every growth in a player like Skyy Clark, there was a decline in a player like Dylan Andrews. For every losing streak that had people proclaiming the team would miss the NCAA Tournament, there was a winning streak where people proclaimed the team was a dark-horse championship contender.
This debate over whether the season was a success or not gets into a larger question of what success even looks like in this era dominated by NIL and the transfer portal. I’ll talk about UCLA’s recruitment strategies over the last few years in the next section, but for the purposes of this discussion, it should be noted that there is more volatility on a year-to-year basis than ever before. Teams that look good on paper, like a Kansas or UConn, did not turn out to be nearly as good once they took the floor, while surprise teams like Michigan State and St. John’s can defy expectations and put together elite seasons out of nowhere. Tennessee’s best scorer, Chaz Lanier, was playing at North Florida the past four seasons and saw a major jump in production in his last season which managed to translate when he moved from the ASUN to the SEC. And with how much these rosters change on a yearly basis, trying to gauge success prior to the season is a fool’s errand.
If this all seems long and meandering and lacking in a point, well, you watched that UCLA season just like I did. Trying to come to an objective answer to the question of whether the season was successful or not just leads to more questions, and I don’t think I have the time or energy to continue down that rabbit hole, so I leave it to you to argue in the comments on this one.
(For me, I would lean towards the season being a successful one in that it reset the roster and found a new set of foundational pieces for future rosters, but I can understand judging each season on its own merits.)
Hey, Let’s Talk About Those KenPom Rankings Some More
I did want to come back to UCLA’s offensive and defensive numbers, because I find them interesting and because I love to talk about the concept of perception versus reality.
Let’s talk about the offense first, because it always seems to be the focus of UCLA fans whenever a loss occurs. The critics of Mick Cronin love to harp on this idea that Cronin is a bad offensive coach, but there never seems to be any empirical evidence to back these statements up. It usually comes down to different variations of “the iso-ball strategy that Cronin employs is a failure.” So I went and pulled up a ton of stats for you all, covering a range of statistical categories from the entirety of Cronin’s UCLA tenure. I also marked the best and worst marks for each category with yellow and red, respectively.
A few things stand out here. For one, last year truly was miserable, and the fact that UCLA went from lows in so many categories to highs in so many is something that likely went unnoticed by many fans. Outside of the initial season and last year, UCLA’s numbers remain pretty consistent, and on a national level, Mick Cronin tends to produce great offenses.
The biggest thing that stands out to me, however, is that the numbers confirmed this idea that has been percolating in my head all season, which is that Mick Cronin did evolve his offense this season, and the best way to describe it is that the team was more NBA-esque in its approach. Specifically, look at that three-point attempt rate, which made a pretty significant jump this season, which was a nice development when the team hit from the outside at an above-average clip. The amount of three-pointers they took is still well below the NCAA average, but that shift does at least show that Cronin acknowledges the increasing importance of the three-point shot to an offense.
On top of that, UCLA’s assist rate skyrocketed this season, finishing at a spot that would place them at 32nd in the nation in that category. UCLA was much better at letting the offense flow and playing unselfish basketball, passing up good shots for great shots. It comes as no surprise that UCLA ended up with its best shooting numbers of the Cronin era as a result.
When I say that UCLA is shifting to more of an NBA-esque offense, I do not mean that the iso-centric offense of the Jaquez and Juzang era is a thing of the past. Rather, there is more reason and thought being put into its implementation and the window dressing than in years past. NBA offenses often run isolation plays for their stars, counting on them to make the correct read in each situation, but there is more to it than handing the ball to the star and asking them to make a play. Those offenses will work to get the specific player the ball in an advantageous position, and then position other players in different spots to give them options based on what the defense does. UCLA did this more often this season than they had in the past, especially when they worked the ball into the post, giving Tyler Bilodeau and Aday Mara outlets on the perimeter that were able to punish opposing defenses for overplaying them, freeing them up to work in isolation more freely. The offense also had little wrinkles for different personnel. For example, Bilodeau was a tremendous pick-and-pop option on the outside, so UCLA would run actions to free him up for those shots. Similarly, Aday Mara is a gifted passer, so UCLA would run cutting actions that allowed Mara to thread passes for easy buckets.
Now, there were still vestiges of the old iso-ball style, especially in late-game situations where Cronin is most comfortable putting the ball in one player’s hands and asking them to make a play. The flaws of this roster came to light in those situations, as the team lacked a true closer and kept auditioning different players in that spot with varying success, but I also don’t think that is a Cronin-specific flaw but rather a flaw that the vast majority of coaches have where they want to put the ball in the hands of their best player in those situations and drop their usual offense as a result.
My guess regarding the hate Cronin gets for his offense is that a lot of people are approaching this with some preconceived notions and are refusing to acknowledge the shifts in style. I don’t fault people for this - it’s human nature, after all - but for my money, it does come across as disingenuous. At the same time, I think there is plenty of room for the offense to grow; for example, I think UCLA is currently poor at implementing pick and rolls, and especially as the offense looks to integrate Aday Mara even more next year, that feels like a potent offensive option, getting a 7-3 center with excellent passing ability on the roll and giving him the chance to make a play.
The defensive numbers are fascinating for different reasons. If you went with the efficiency numbers, this was the second-best defense of the Cronin era. But I would argue that this defense was not nearly as good as it could have been. Of course, one elephant in the room is that Aday Mara played as few minutes as he did despite being UCLA’s best interior defender, but up and down the lineup UCLA had issues. Bilodeau grew into a passable interior defender but spent much of the season being miserable against the pick-and-roll, while Eric Dailey’s defense fell off even worse than his offense over the last part of the season. Kobe Johnson graded out as a solid defender, but he never truly shook the Andy Enfield from his system, while Sebastian Mack spent the vast majority of his minutes as a defensive liability. The Bruins were an exceptionally poor defensive rebounding team, and opponents generally shot well against them. So, how did this team end up ranked as highly as they did on the defensive end? Pretty simple: they were elite at creating turnovers and limiting the number of two-pointers opponents took. Mick Cronin loves a good pack-line defense, and it was generally hard for opponents to even get shots off in the interior against them due to the Bruins’ active hands, but there were a lot of deficiencies that prevented this roster from having a truly elite defense.
An Analysis of UCLA’s Evolving Portal Strategy
I’m going to end the first part of this post-mortem by laying out how UCLA’s portal and NIL strategy have evolved over the past few seasons, mostly so I have something I can refer people to in the future when these discussions inevitably pop up.
Let’s set the scene by laying out some facts:
Prior to NIL dominating the recruiting scene, Mick Cronin was a solid recruiter. He brought in his fair share of 5-star talent (Amari Bailey, Peyton Watson, Adem Bona) while also grabbing some multi-year players with upside like Jaylen Clark. Were there some misses in this time? Absolutely, like Mac Etienne and Abramo Canka, but in general, the recruiting was fine.
The big reason UCLA had lower-rated classes during those years is pretty simple: no one was leaving. Given the success UCLA experienced in Cronin’s first four years at the helm, you would expect a good number of players to depart for the NBA Draft or leave for better opportunities, but that did not happen. Mick Cronin’s loyalty to his players, at times both his biggest strength and weakness as a coach, also meant he was not pushing people out at nearly the rate you would expect for a blueblood. The end result is that UCLA enjoyed unparalleled roster continuity for four seasons, but at the cost of little foundation built for when Jaquez, Campbell, and company would eventually have to move on. Players like KJ Simpson, Jahmai Mashack, Donovan Dent, and others were unable to be brought in by Cronin due to that roster crunch.
Thus, we get to the 2023 recruiting class, which also happens to be the first recruiting class of the NIL era, and UCLA is hopelessly behind in funding on that front. This was not a Cronin-caused issue, but one from the athletic department above, which was (and in some ways still is) actively hostile towards any NIL and collective efforts being put together to support sports, likely aided by Chip Kelly’s ambivalence towards NIL. With so many spots on the roster needing to be filled, this causes Cronin and his staff to try to pivot towards the ill-fated Euro infusion, spearheaded by assistant coach Ivo Simovic. These recruits were much cheaper than the average American player and theoretically had plenty of experience playing in European professional leagues, so the transition to college ball would hopefully be smoother. We know the result of this: none of the European players are able to make an impact, and all but Aday Mara transfer out at the end of the season. Simovic had already left before the season, so the architect of the idea was gone as well. The Bruins got some important pieces from the whole debacle (Mara, Sebastian Mack, Brandon Williams), but the end result is that the Bruins began the NIL era one year behind its peers, thanks to the efforts of the athletic department.
Of course, Cronin also saw the writing on the wall and spent all of the 2023-2024 season working with Men of Westwood and openly promoting it, pulling an end-around on the AD to get an infusion of cash. It works, and UCLA ends up with an NIL collective that, at least in basketball, can be nationally competitive for players. Cronin flexes that new money right away, completely remaking the roster this past offseason, bringing in six highly-regarded transfers while also paying enough NIL to essentially get a 14th player on the roster, outside of the scholarship limit.
Those are the general facts, but now I want to focus on UCLA’s approach to the portal and roster construction and offer some constructive criticism of the process UCLA and Cronin have employed.
I think, from a rational perspective, you can go ahead and give Cronin a mulligan for that 2023 recruiting class. As I mentioned, the staff was put into a tough position of trying to get recruits with one hand tied behind their backs thanks to the NIL situation, and given the number of players that needed to be replaced, I can’t necessarily fault the coaching staff for trying to zag when everyone else was zigging. That it did not work is besides the point, especially as that failure allowed Cronin to go to donors with tangible evidence that the road they were traveling down was not going to lead to success. Men of Westwood is nowhere near the success that it is without the tireless donor work that Cronin has put in.
When it comes to this last offseason, I like a lot of what UCLA did. Just like with 2023, this was a complete roster reset, which necessitated the Bruins having to spread out their NIL dollars, but the level of talent that was brought in was much higher because UCLA was spending much more on that talent. Before the season, I stated that UCLA’s ceiling was much higher due to improvements across the board, and that generally played out, with the Bruins able to grab a handful of multi-year starters out of the portal with guys like Skyy Clark, Tyler Bilodeau, and Eric Dailey.
But after a year of watching this team, alongside the rest of college basketball, it is readily apparent that UCLA’s NIL approach requires some tweaks. Much of UCLA’s NIL approach has been about being equitable in how it spreads out its NIL money; the Bruins have some players who make more than others, but this isn’t a situation where some guys are making $2 million while others are making $250,000. This situation allowed UCLA to bring in a host of pretty good players, but they did not end up with an exceptional talent, and in matchups with some of the best teams on the schedule, UCLA’s lack of top-end talent proved costly. The floor for this UCLA team was raised considerably, but the ceiling did not rise to a similar level.
(For the record, I feel that the idea was that Dylan Andrews was going to be that guy for UCLA, which wasn’t a ridiculous thought going into the season given how the latter half of his 2023-2024 season went, but as the season went on it became clear that he was never going to be that guy. But we’ll talk about him later.)
My theory on roster construction in the NIL/Portal era is, first and foremost, that it’s hard. You have to essentially rerecruit your roster every offseason, and be willing to let people go if they are underperforming, which, I know for Cronin is antithetical to his nature. In addition, some of the numbers that players are asking for in the portal are absolutely wild, and there is a certain amount of rapid inflationary costs when it comes to NIL numbers that players are asking for. This is especially true for incoming freshmen; AJ Dybantsa is reportedly going to BYU for around $7 million, but when a player like Brayden Burries is asking for around $2 million despite having never played a game at the collegiate level, you have to ask if programs are spending money wisely, especially in light of what Rutgers just did with two top 5 NBA picks on their roster this season.
For my money, the best approach to roster construction does still involve high school players, but unless you’re dealing with a Cooper Flagg-level talent, you are better off getting a four-star that can develop for a year or two while getting acclimated to the speed and physicality of the college game. That also helps to provide your team with a better base to build from, because the other part of this new roster construction is that you have to be willing to break the bank for an elite player. The truly elite players are likely to be in the program for only a year, so it is acceptable to splurge on one or two if possible, knowing that the money will be freed up the following season. UCLA found success running with a team filled with Robins, but for them to reach that elite tier, they need a Batman. It appears Cronin understands this is the next step, as the program is reportedly willing to go heavily after Donovan Dent, the point guard transfer from New Mexico who is currently ranked #1 in the transfer rankings per 247Sports. Dent will command a NIL number somewhere between $2 and $3 million, and UCLA appears willing to match that number and use its already-solid relationship with Dent to get over the finish line.
Adding a talent like Dent makes UCLA a really strong team next season, thanks to the groundwork that was laid this year. Unlike the 2023 class, UCLA has a solid core of Skyy Clark, Tyler Bilodeau, Eric Dailey, and Aday Mara to build around. Dent gives the team the closer that Cronin is looking for, while also opening up more of the offense thanks to his ability to both get his shot and create for others. You have good bench options in Eric Freeny, Brandon Williams, and potentially Trent Perry and Sebastian Mack, and don’t need to break the bank on bringing in another wing and a backup center. Plus, all of those players now have a year in the program and are better prepared for what Cronin is asking of them on both ends. There is a lot to like should all that come to pass.
In Part II, we’ll dive into the curious case of Dylan Andrews, Aday Mara and see if anything changes in recruiting in the next few days, which it probably will.
Go Bruins!
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Dent has committed to ucla!!!!
We need a valid center or big forward in this recruiting class. Or both. The paint play was bad.