UCLA Men's Basketball 2025 Post-Mortem Part 2: Much Aday About Nothing

More discussion about Aday Mara, Dylan Andrews, and Mick Cronin.

Aday Mara (Photo credit: Jan Kim Lim/uclabruins.com)

---

You know, I was planning to write this second part earlier, but all hell seemed to break loose a week ago, so I decided to wait everything out until the dust settled to get as much of the story as possible. I think at this point we finally have enough information to be comfortable with the situation, or at least enough to be comfortable about being uncomfortable.

Also, you guys need a new article to argue about in the comments.

Last time, we took a closer look at success for UCLA basketball in 2025, had a deeper analysis of the Bruins’ statistical results, and tried to analyze Mick Cronin and the program’s approach to roster building. In the second half of this men’s basketball post-mortem, we’ll be focusing more on the Aday Mara of it all, having a discussion about the biggest problem of last season, and settle the debate once and for all whether Mick Cronin is a good coach*.

Ripping the Band-Aid on the Aday Mara Situation

There are two things to talk about regarding Aday Mara, one of which revolves around this past season and one of which revolves around him no longer being a part of the UCLA program. I’m going to talk about the latter situation first, since I assume that’s what most people are curious about.

In the few days after UCLA’s exit from the NCAA Tournament, Mick Cronin met with the entire roster and laid out what he saw as their role for next year, after which representatives from Men of Westwood met with certain players to negotiate a rate for next year. This includes Aday Mara, and the reporting from around this time was that Mara had a handshake agreement for next year with UCLA that included him being the starting center in the future (in fact, Tyler Bilodeau’s return was contingent on the fact that Cronin agree to play him primarily at the four, which is his more natural position). With that agreement in place, Mara then headed off for Spain to be with his family for Spring Break.

What happened next is still shrouded in some level of mystery, but reports from UCLA sources allege that upon his return from Spring Break, Aday Mara approached the coaching staff with a new list of demands for next season. While this included a modest pay increase from the previously-agreed-upon amount (which UCLA was prepared to match), it also reportedly included demands to be able to spend the summer in Spain, show up to preseason practices when he wanted to, and to be able to go back to Spain during the season. Or, to put it another way, Mara’s camp came back with a list of demands that would be considered unreasonable to any college coach, let alone Mick Cronin. I’ve done enough digging to conclude that the general tenor of the post-Spring Break meetings matched this vibe, although I am still unsure how accurate the specificity of those demands are. That said, talks broke down at that point, Mara entered the transfer portal, and immediate signs pointed towards Michigan as his new destination.

There are a few takeaways from this entire saga. The first, most obvious one, is that something happened while Mara was on Spring Break, and I don’t think it is that crazy to state he was tampered with. The complete 180 that UCLA experienced in their negotiations with Mara points in that direction, as do the almost-immediate rumors that Mara’s intended destination was Michigan. It does not help that Michigan is operating on an entirely different level than almost everyone else when it comes to NIL, recognizing (perhaps correctly) that until federal legislation is passed, there is nothing stopping them from simply buying as much talent as possible with their alumni’s deep pockets. The thing is, I can’t even fault them for this; if UCLA had that level of alumni support, I would want them to do the same thing. You can blame decades of mismanagement by the athletic department for cultivating future donors here, but UCLA is already operating at a top 10 level for basketball NIL as it is. There are levels to this game.

Second, it is hard to state how much Mara’s usage this past year had to do with his decision to depart, especially given that he had agreed to a return prior to his departure to Spain. I’ll talk more about Cronin’s decisions regarding his playing time in the next section, but if there was a problem with that usage, Mara and his camp did not make it known prior to their about-face. My educated guess is that once Mara’s camp decided they wanted to take Michigan’s offer wanted out of UCLA, they decided to make a bigger deal of that usage as grounds for his departure. Mara’s camp has gone underground since the UCLA deal fell apart, so it is impossible to know for sure, but given the evidence, I think it is disingenuous to believe this was a major factor in Mara’s decision.

But let’s get into that a bit more.

Aday Mara was Underused, But for Understandable Reasons

I think everyone has seemingly forgotten that Aday Mara started his third game ever in a UCLA uniform, and ended up starting eight games for UCLA in his freshman season. Ever since he came into the UCLA fold, Mick Cronin has been enamored with Aday Mara and tried to make him an integral part of his rotation from the start.

The problem? Mara was not even close to ready when he arrived, and his freshman year was marred by poor play, poor cardio, and a poor understanding of the college game. It took the entirety of last season for him to even look playable in a backup role, but despite all of that, there was a clear understanding from everyone involved that Mara was set to be a bigger part of the rotation during his sophomore year, provided he took the necessary leap.

Yet even last offseason was filled with some worrying signs. For the second year in a row, Mara missed preseason training with the rest of the team, instead playing for the Spanish national team again. I understand this from Mara’s perspective - it is hard to turn down the opportunity to represent your nation - but for UCLA and Cronin, this also led to another offseason where Mara came into camp out of shape, with the added complication of suffering a foot injury that delayed the start of his training even further. At that point, it wasn’t surprising that Cronin shifted his strategy away from Mara as a main focal point and towards playing Tyler Bilodeau out of position, because what was the real option? Hope that Mara figures it out immediately? Even early on this year, Mara did not look like a playable option against quality opponents, and I was personally lamenting that Cronin did not use the transfer portal to go find a more ready post option than UCLA got.

Then the Wisconsin game happened, and suddenly Aday Mara was all we could think about.

I’m not going to tell you that the Wisconsin game was a flash in the pan moment. Mara himself certainly never reached the highs of that game again, though he did have a solid second half of the season as he played more assertively and the team ran more actions for him. Unfortunately for him, a lot of that positive momentum was cut short by a flu that knocked him out for a few games and ruined his cardio for the remainder of the season. Even in the Tennessee game, he was shown on camera asking out of the game due to being tired.

Often in postgame writeups later in the season, I would lament the lack of usage for Aday, even in games where I knew he could only go for 10 minutes at best (looking right at that Illinois game here). But now that the totality of the season has played out, I also cannot blame Cronin for his usage of Mara because, simply put, Mara was never there. He was late to preseason practices, started out slow, and even when he finally had his breakout moment, sickness took him right back out. It is hard to have much faith in a player to consistently perform at a high level when they have rarely done so, even if they are above 7’ and will continue to be above 7’ for the foreseeable future.

I think back to that opening season when I think of what could have been for Aday Mara, because from my perspective, Mick Cronin desperately wanted him to be successful here and was trying to find ways for it to work from the very beginning. The team itself was going to be situated around the combination of Donovan Dent and Aday Mara, creating all sorts of room for the rest of the roster to contribute to an elite inside-out game. Tyler Bilodeau requested to primarily be at the four next season to accommodate Mara; Eric Dailey was going to train to become a realistic option at the three for a similar reason. All that was asked of Mara was for a greater commitment to the program, and before he left for Spain, that’s exactly what was agreed to.

The great tragedy here is that we will never get to see what that version of Aday Mara looks like. Mara is off to Michigan, where he will be fine - he’s not a comparable player to Wolff or Goldin by any stretch, lacking Wolff’s ballhandling and shooting range and Goldin’s physicality, but Dusty May is a solid coach who will come up with something. UCLA is left to retool, which they have done with the additions of Xavier Booker and Steven Jamerson, but the program is still less without Mara in the fold.

The whole situation has me pretty depressed, if I’m being honest. Let’s talk about a happier topic…oh come on.

Dylan Andrews and the Folly of the Second-Half Surge

I’m sure most readers believe that Mara’s usage was the biggest thing holding this recent UCLA team back, but if I may, the biggest problem UCLA could not figure out was the reversion of Dylan Andrews.

The 2024-2025 UCLA men’s basketball roster was certainly the deepest roster that the school had seen in a long time, but one glaring flaw at the end of the season was a lack of a go-to player, someone who could go out and get a basket when that was required. This isn’t a criticism of Cronin’s offense, by the way; every team that plays at an elite level still has a go-to player for those moments when they need a basket. In UCLA’s case, their problem was not so much a lack of that type of player as it was the fact that the guy they believed would be that player could never get out of first gear. The worst part is it’s hard to even fault Cronin and the staff for this.

Anyone who watched UCLA’s 2023-2024 season likely came away with a few thoughts. The first was that Cronin was a crazy person for thinking a team with that many freshmen was a good idea. But the second thought was that Dylan Andrews had taken the leap and was poised to have a breakout season the following year, likely leading to his departure at the end of the season. That last part turned out to be true, but not because Andrews is off to the NBA, but rather because his year was a disaster that required him to find a new program to reestablish himself at.

From a statistical standpoint, Andrews’s season was a major step back from the year prior. Andrews saw his PPG cut in half from 12.9 to 6.9, with his minutes dropping by around 10 minutes a game at the same time. Assist numbers, rebounding numbers, and free throw numbers were similarly down compared to the year before. The more interesting part is that his shooting numbers were comparable to what he put up the season prior, but given that he shot the ball much less this year and that last year’s numbers do still include the first half of the season, it isn’t that big of an accomplishment.

As the season wore on, it became clear just how much this roster hinged on Dylan Andrews playing to the level that he showed at the end of the 2023-2024 season. That player was a borderline All-Conference guy, someone that the team could rely on to create his own shot and create for everyone else. In that season, Andrews scored in double-digits in 13 of UCLA’s final 14 games; this past year, Andrews only managed that feat in nine games throughout the year. If you go by game score, which tries to measure the totality of a player’s performance, Andrews only reached a double-digit score eight times, while he had seven such scores in that final stretch the year before, with all of them higher than anything Andrews put together during conference play. It should come as no surprise that Andrews saw his minutes dip as the season progressed. UCLA found solutions in the aggregate - Skyy Clark emerged as a better distributor and quarterback of the offense, Eric Dailey took time as the go-to scorer - but these were imperfect solutions.

UCLA’s imperfect roster construction was still good enough for a top-half finish in the Big Ten, but the diminished play from Andrews lowered the ceiling of the team considerably more than anything else on the roster. The ultimate irony of Donovan Dent coming home to this team is that he was in the same recruiting class as Andrews and was one of the many players Cronin could not take because of roster limits. But Dent went elsewhere and proved he was a player who could perform at this level, while Andrews was never able to reach that sort of consistency.

Is Mick Cronin a Good Coach?

Yes.

Thanks for reading and supporting the Mighty Bruin!

…

Ok, you want more, I get it.

I think this is a loaded question, because the people asking it are not asking if Mick Cronin is a good coach, but rather whether Mick Cronin is the right coach for UCLA, and I think there is a vast difference between those two things. So let’s dive into both of them.

If you couldn’t tell from that initial answer, I don’t have much patience for arguments that Mick Cronin is a bad coach. While I don’t put much stock into “X coach is the youngest to X wins” arguments, it should be noted that getting to 500 wins in general is a pretty big accomplishment; if Cronin were bad at his job, he would have been nowhere close to that number. I understand this is also an argument you could make regarding one Steve Alford, and that’s where I would throw in that, from an advanced statistical look, Cronin always puts out solid to excellent teams, while Alford was more likely to put out more middling performances with their respective talent levels. To compare those two, Mick Cronin at Cincinnati had a higher KenPom result than Steve Alford for three of Alford’s six UCLA seasons, had a higher average KenPom rating for those six years, and had the highest single-season ranking when his Bearcats finished the season 4th in the 2018 season. Cronin did all that while transitioning Cincinnati to a new conference and, you know, being at Cincinnati and not UCLA, where there is a higher level of talent available.

Also, as Bill Walton was apt to point out, Mick Cronin never scheduled a game with Liberty, so that’s a point in his favor on that comparison as well.

To further the point here, I always like to look at what other coaches and programs are saying about Mick Cronin. I don’t mean their fans, but what the real ball knowers have to say, and what I tend to see is a general level of respect for Cronin. Rick Barnes, a guy who is known to be a big fan of UCLA as a program, was effusive in his praise of Cronin both before and after the 2nd round matchup with Tennessee during the NCAA Tournament, while another Hall of Fame-level coach in Tom Izzo did the same thing this season (and I’ve heard rumors that he helped steer his former player Xavier Booker towards UCLA once that became an option).

You can throw in the rumors of various programs that have checked into Cronin as an option this past year. Indiana stood out as the most prominent school on this front, and the interest from the Hoosier administration was legitimate, with the biggest negative not being his offensive acumen or recruiting, but his UCLA buyout. Villanova was in a similar situation, but they had a cheaper option in Kevin Willard appeared before them, which made more sense than spending the $16+ million needed to get Cronin. These schools both felt that Cronin was a good-enough coach to do their due diligence on.

Is Cronin a good coach? Absolutely, and I’d even say he’s one of the better ones in the college game today. But that’s not an interesting question; the real question that so many people want to ask is whether Cronin is the right coach for UCLA basketball, and I think that is a much more interesting question to consider.

Spoiler for this question: I don’t have a definitive answer, mostly because I think that there is no definitive answer for what UCLA basketball needs. Different people are going to have different opinions on what a UCLA basketball coach is supposed to be, and it would be wrong of me to state that one opinion holds more weight than others. Outside of something universal like “don’t be a rape apologist”, people are going to have different tolerances for the various nuances displayed by each coach.

Take Mick Cronin’s penchant for yelling and outbursts. There are plenty of UCLA fans who believe it is a disqualifying trait of his, while others consider this a cost of doing business, especially given that Cronin is not an outlier on that front and the most successfuly coach of the past few years, Dan Hurley, is in so many ways worse than Cronin in this regard. Or take talent acquisition, where everyone has opinions on Cronin’s ability (or non-ability) to get players to play basketball in Westwood. Schematic decisions, player development, all of it adding up to a view of Mick Cronin that has only crystallized in the past few seasons as people dig in their heels regarding how they feel.

Which, I’ll be honest as well, has made discussing Mick Cronin at all a bit exhausting. I’ve personally stopped paying much attention to the comment section of basketball articles because people cannot have an actual conversation without resorting to name-calling and ridiculous assertions. It’s all childish and only serves to make me want to write less.

If you pressed me to answer the question of whether Mick Cronin is the right coach for UCLA, I would answer simply that he is a perfectly acceptable coach for UCLA given the changing landscape of college basketball. He’s not perfect, but chasing after perfection is how you end up with a situation like Ben Howland changing his approach to attract recruits, or Steve Alford in general. Mick Cronin gives you a high-floor team that has the potential to go on a great run, which is not the worst place in the world to be. I do think Cronin needs to continue the evolution he began this year on offense, and likely needs to revisit some of his defensive principles, especially regarding three-point defense, but those are fixable things, and he’s at least starting from a pretty solid base when it comes to making adjustments.

---

That’s all for the men’s basketball post-mortem. Maybe this summer, I’ll give a recap of what the roster looks like heading into the season, provided things finally slow down by then.

And yes, there will be a women’s basketball post-mortem soon. I’m taking my time here waiting for the initial transfer portal wave to subside before digging into it.

Go Bruins!

---

Thanks again for supporting The Mighty Bruin. Your paid subscriptions make this site possible. Questions, comments, story ideas, angry missives and more can be sent to @TheMightyBruin on Twitter.