WATCH: Mick Cronin on UCLA Men's Basketball Going to Marquette, Handling Hiatus

The Bruins will have had 10 days off between games when they play the Golden Eagles as a result of COVID-19 issues within the Washington program.

UCLA men's basketball coach Mick Cronin talked to reporters before practice Thursday morning, breaking down the upcoming game against Marquette, where he thinks the Bruins have adjusted the most in recent weeks and the progress Cody Riley is making in his return from the early-season knee injury. 

MICK CRONIN

Playing a real road game?

Yeah, I think you don’t ever want to go to conference play not having played a road game yet, so we played one at UNLV, albeit, I thought the crowd would be much better than it was. I told the guys the crowd was going to be packed at UNLV and some guys were looking at me sideways after the game, so I said, ‘Well, look, you’ve got to give me one more chance, I promise you Marquette will be packed.’ I’ve played there many times, they don’t have football, I know how it is there, so we’ll have great crowd Saturday so it should be exciting, but all road games are hard. The more you play them, the more it evens out. I’ve heard this one so many times, college basketball’s the most homecourt advantage of any sport—75% winning percentage.

Most memorable Marquette games?

Boy, I had a lot of them. You know, coach Huggins’ assistant, coach Pitino’s assistant and many years by myself up there. I know one time we beat them on senior day when they had Jimmy Butler and that was a huge win, but what I would tell you is their crowd has always been consistent. Being a basketball-only school, they’ve always had good coaching. Shoot, when I first started going there with Hugs, Mike Deane was the coach, then the Kevin O’Neill and Tom Crean and Buzz Williams had a great run obviously and now they’ve got Shaka but I never played there when it was so … you, know, I expect that we’ll get their best effort.

How do you avoid the noise?

Yeah, I think we’ve kind of moved on from that after we got whacked. We got whacked pretty good, so humble pie will get you back to reality, which for me is a good thing, it’s kind of why I tried to make this schedule tough. I’m just a believer in you’ve got to try to get better every day. You can’t even worry about, like, we play Saturday, I’m worried about today’s practice. I think you’ve got to try to teach young people that, which is really hard because the noise is everywhere with the 24-hour media cycle everybody’s got a hand-held device of some kind, even my dad at 80 years old has a hand-held device giving him information, so trying to get my guys to just worry about getting better every day. Big picture, obviously, until we have Cody back to full speed, it’s an opportunity for others to grow and us to get better but look, we’re 10 points or more better with him, that’s just a fact. So I look at those opportunities for us to have to fight through that. Obviously, we have eyes on big prizes that are later in the season, so not that we wanted to go through this and especially losing Mac and Will for the season because it’s affected our practice. We’re at a point when Jaime went down, he missed some days. He's back now full speed—I know you guys were maybe going to ask that but he didn’t practice until Wednesday, so you’re down Mac, Cody, Jaime, Will—that’s four scholarship guys, but it’s tough, but it’s things you go through. You guys cover a lot of sports, you know, injuries are part of it, but opportunity for us to get better but again, expectations are great, but they’re for other people. You’ve got to focus on getting better every day and theoretically, when you have a veteran team, they know that, they should be able to block out noise and focus on the work and just keep trying to get better and take them one at a time, we’re going to have our hands full with Marquette too Saturday. You know, tough road game, big environment, obviously I would guess it’s their last big nonconference game because I know the Big East, they’re going to 20 league games as well.

Where's Cody in his recovery?

He’s close.

Started practicing?

Light. When I say that, I mean like one play on and two plays off.

Any chance he plays Saturday?

I’d have a better idea after Friday’s practice. Conditioning-wise, he’s not there. His knee’s back healthy, I think, it’s more conditioning and getting his confidence in his body back.

Play in limited minutes or wait until full strength?

I’d have to see, I would never put him out there unless he was totally confident in being out there, so he could see limited minutes Saturday, he could see limited minutes against Alabama State. Yesterday he saw limited minutes, so it’s just a matter of his conditioning.

Gone up against Shaka Smart?

We were close a few times. I went down with an arterial dissection the night before the game when we were scheduled to play each other at VCU-Cincinnati, so I was on some sort of horse tranquilizer when they played that game—don’t recall much of that one—and then he left for the return game to VCU, I coached against Will Wade, [Smart] went to Texas. Then last year, I thought we were going to play. When we beat BYU, I think, you know what, we’re going to play Texas and I was doing a media Zoom with you guys, I walked out and somebody said they lost, so this will be our first time. Actually, we’re both on the sidelines coaching against each other.

What are Smart's teams like and how hard is it to go against his defenses?

Yeah, a lot of it, what happens in our business is, you know, it’s interesting, he did what he had to do to win at VCU, which was very different from what he had to do to win at Texas—and he did win at Texas. You know, good coaches that last like coach Smart, you adapt to your personnel and it’s his first year, you get a job, you’ve got to try to get … the good thing about nowadays, you get a job, you can get a bunch of transfers and have a team versus when I took the job at Cincinnati, guys that I love dearly, I was running around in May signing guys that I was recruiting at Murray State because it was not good to play in the Big East. Now you can get a bunch of transfers, but it’s still not probably indicative of what he wants their program to look like longterm. But he’s adjusted. He’s back to trying to pick up the pace on defense, they do press—not near the way they pressed at VCU, but again, that’s personnel.

Help or hurt to go up against someone you know?

Yeah, I would say the only time I felt I had an advantage would be coaching against Rick Pitino and Bob Huggins because I knew what they were thinking every day because I spent every day with them, but then I’d look in the mirror and realize that they’re both either are or are going to be in the Hall of Fame, so I’d question my advantage. I haven’t ever coached against Shaka; I have great respect for what he’s done in his career and what he’s going to do at Marquette—it’s a great basketball environment, it really is, everybody’s been successful to some extent there and obviously Tom Crean made the Final Four, Buzz was wildly successful and I think Shaka will be, but again, like I said, it’s his first year and guys like him—he’s not the only one out there—they’ve been able to put quality teams together on the run, which is not an easy thing to do. You know, they had already beaten West Virginia, which is going to be ranked next week, I think. But he’s a great coach, make no mistake about it. Sometimes expectations get a little out of whack—they probably did for him at Texas because of what he did at VCU, but as long as he’s doing this, he’s going to win.

How often do you look back and wish you got guys for more playing time and who are they?

For us, Jake and David. We’re obviously backlogged at the "two guard" position and for us, Johnny’s doing a better job rebounding, but for us it’s hard to play Jake, Johnny and David—those three guys, two of them at the same time because you’ve got to remember, we’re small overall because we play a four-guard offense, so it’s not like we’re playing two big guys and we can play them, two [of them], at the two and the three. We rely on Jules’ rebounding a lot and then as Peyton’s developing, having him in there because he has size, so it's hard to get two of those three two guards in at the same time.

How have you handled the 10 day break?

Great. I’ve slept well. I’ve been able to digest food. I think rest is important—it’s a long year, not that we haven’t practiced, but you can take some days where you do less contact and you can pick things we need to do a better job of as coaches and just focus on offensive execution, focus on late-game situations, it gives you a little more time instead of just game prep, game prep, game prep. So some areas where, for us, it was get healthy, No. 1, it gives you a chance to get better. You know, we had a day where we really just focused on offensive execution but once we got back to Wednesday we were back to normal, but Saturday, once the game went down, so we knew Saturday-Sunday, those were two freebies for us to try to just focus on UCLA and not worry about our opponent and we were off Monday, so we had two or three days where we didn’t really have to worry about our next opponent and you can just focus on getting better, which I think a lot of teams enjoy during the holiday break, but now you have take the three days off mandatory over the Christmas break—which I’m all for because that way the guys get to have Christmas and you can’t force games on people on Dec. 26. When I used to be part of Louisville-Kentucky on Dec. 26, we had two-a-days on the 24th and 25th, I remember those days. So that’s a good thing, but having some time to go back and just worry about your own team is an advantage—that, and get healthy, because Jaime would not have played at Washington. He would have tried; his dad said, ‘You can drop him on his head and play him,’ but I told him, ‘You’ve been hanging out with my dad too much.’

Adapted to personnel?

Again, it goes back, like you get a reputation, you know, ‘Mick Cronin’s a defensive guy.’ It’s amazing, I’m waiting for people to pick up on it, the way our offensive efficiency, I’m waiting, because last off-season, everybody who asked me to speak at a clinic asked me to talk on defense; so I’ll know I’ve transcended when I start getting asked to do offensive clinics—I’m not there yet, though. You have to adapt to your personnel and I always have tried to do that whether we’d throw it inside … I would say this: offensively, you’ve got to get your best players the ball. So anybody that’s going to coach fifth-grade basketball out there—I get this a lot—get your best player the ball, okay? So I don’t care who he or she is, get them the ball and for us, we can shoot, so we try to make sure we spread the floor out. What’s been missing is Cody inside for us and Myles gave us an inside presence and he’s worked really hard on his offense—I think that’s important for us. I would say this, having an eye on March when you take this job, you’re not just trying to make the tournament, you’ve got to assess if we’re going to have to grind to make it or if you’re here, you’re trying to advance in it and win it. You have to evolve offensively, you can’t be a one-dimensional, two-dimensional team, so a lot of this, there’s stuff that we do is to try to evolve so that when we get to March we have multiple ways to score. What I’ve learned the hard ways is when you get to March and you don’t have multiple ways to score, it’s hard to advance. So if you look at last year—I know Johnny had a great tournament but it wasn’t, that was a fallacy of our advancement. You know, we had multiple guys whether it was Tyger, Jules, David at times, Cody inside, obviously Jaime became much more of a scorer, so that evolution for us is important, that’s just my experience. And we’ve got guys that can do it but again, the way you coach, you may say, ‘Why’s he got Jaylen Clark bringing the ball up the floor for?’ but again, that’s going to make us better in the long run.

Silver lining on Cody being out?

All of it. That’s always a silver lining when you have to play without somebody you rely on, it forces you to find other ways to be effective and then when you bring that guy back, you don’t go back and change, you add, so hopefully that’s the case for us, but I’d like to have the big fella back. I miss him dearly.

Looking at the NET yet, you're at 33?

There was another one that was way more crazy. Somebody was like, 100. I don't, Mike was telling me, somebody was 100. I can't – you ask Mike when you guys come out, somebody was 100-and-something in the NET and they're like 11 in the Kenpom. So when you figure out that thing, you let me know. I know this, and it's nothing against professor Lunardi, it's December 8th, 9th. Especially when you're in a high major league, it doesn't shake until the end. I just watch games, that tells me who's really good.

Like KenPom more?

I think, for a coach, it tells you your points per possession offensively and defensively, where you stand, your points per possession. And even KenPom cause it factors in last year, I don't like that, so you have to filter it out where – how many points you're giving per possession because when you look at field goal percentage, the NBA has effectively field goal percentage, it's usually some teams, they give up, it's hard to score on them on field goals, but they foul, so their effective field goal is not as good. So points per possession that you're scoring, how you're defending, for me, matters because if it does it by points per game, if you're playing a faster game, the other team's got more possessions, so it's point per possession. For me, that can help, that kind of shows you where your team is at.

Target points per possession?

About 8.5, but I don't know. I've had some Cincinnati teams – .85 I mean. I had some Cincinnati teams, I think my best one, we got up to second one year, defensively.

Offensively?

Yeah, defensively. Oh, you're talking about offensively. Oh, 1.2. If you can get 1.27ish, you're top 10 in the country.

How important for you or any coach to have such a good memory? Elephants come to you and they forget stuff?

It's a curse as well. It's a curse when you can't let – coaches, we have a big problem: We remember every loss, tough loss, every one. The wins tend to fade away cause you stick on the losses. But being anybody that's if you're trying to be at the top of the Pyramid of Success from wins and losses, you're holding yourself to a high standard. There's not a lot of room at the top of that pyramid. Only one team can be at the top, so you have to be a perfectionist. How do you get there? It's just how do you improve. And it goes back, for us, to me, Tracy had a great question – since I've come here, trying, for me, if you look at our last two years, we won 11 of our last 14 my first year here, we got beat on a buzzer shot from winning eight in a row and the Pac-12. And then last year, despite massive injuries and losses of personnel, we got much better as the season went on. You know, the schedule was tough late, we missed some free throws, cost us some games, but you're playing Elite Eight teams and losing at the buzzer. But you gotta get better at the end of the year, that's college basketball. And I think the way you do that, you gotta develop your bench, you gotta find a way to develop your bench, you gotta find a way to be multidimensional offensively cause there's games where Johnny's not gonna be able to win the game for you. He could be in foul trouble, he could get hurt, you could have to play the whole first month of the season without Cody Riley. So I'm looking forward to getting him back, guys. I know we've kind of made – other than the Gonzaga game – we've made it look like we don't miss him, but I promise you, we do, I promise you.

Shaka's hair?

Yeah, maybe he's just rubbing it in on the rest of us. Or maybe I'll just prove a point, I'm gonna let it grow out and see. He's young still, man, he's young. Like my man Leonard Hamilton doesn't stress, that's why he's still got gray hair. Him and Jim Hill, it's amazing.

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