Watch UCLA basketball enough, and you can start to pick up on some of Mick Cronin‘s sideline habits. When something good happens, Cronin doesn’t uncork a Tiger Woods fist pump. He spins on his heel and struts up the sideline with a stone-faced glare probably already thinking about the misery he wants to inflict on the next defensive possession.
Watch for it next time.
Bucket. Emotionless, speedy walk up the sideline.
It’s happening a bit more these days. Cronin’s strut has started to come back, along with UCLA’s swagger. The second-youngest high-major team in the country is growing up. UCLA was left for dead after Utah handed it a 46-point stomping in early January, but it’s reeled off a 7-1 heater in the last month.
Dylan Andrews‘ emergence might be a microcosm of everything UCLA has been through. With roughly 30 seconds left this past Saturday at Cal, UCLA trailed by a penny. Andrews had the rock on the right wing, his feet etched in the Haas Pavilion letters. Andrews wiggled around an Adem Bona screen, settled at the left elbow and uncorked a 15-foot jumper.
Bang.
UCLA would never trail again.
That pull-up jumper betrayed Andrews at various points of the season. The sophomore point guard shot a miserable 1 for 9 on pull-up, midrange jumpers in UCLA’s gutting 69-65 loss to Gonzaga in the Maui Invitational. At one point, Andrews had missed 10 straight pull-up midrange jumpers in Pac-12 play, according to Synergy.
They The Old Days. Thanks, Slim Charles.
Andrews is averaging 16.8 points and four assists in UCLA’s five-game winning streak, and he’s drilled 14 of his last 31 (45%) midrange pull-ups. He’s turned into the guard UCLA so desperately needed to pair with Bona.
That’s development.
“Gotta give (Andrews) a chance to get some reps, to get some experience,” Cronin said after UCLA’s 61-60 win at Cal. “Even Patrick Mahomes didn’t play as a rookie in the NFL. Getting experience, playing big minutes and having to produce for your team. Playing both ends of the floor, it’s so different than high school. That’s why everybody goes into the portal and gets some old guys.”
UCLA is still quite a bit away from the Big Dance bubble. The Bruins don’t have a single Quad 1 win yet on their ledger. They have four Quad 3 or Quad 4 losses on their resume that are hard to ignore. But this team is shockingly different than what we saw in December and early January.
UCLA’s youngsters have started to show signs of growth and development. Berke Buyuktuncel is behind Brandon Williams in the pecking order, but both are starting to simmer. Williams pestered Cal star Jaylon Tyson all day, holding one of the Pac-12’s best guards and a potential first-round pick to 16 points — a far cry from the 30-point whoopings Tyson has unleashed on other Pac-12 programs.
Buyuktuncel drilled a no-hesitation triple in the second half to keep the Bruins alive. Aday Mara had six points, three rebounds and a sweet dime in the win at Cal. The 7-foot-3, 240-pound center desperately needs an offseason in the weight room, but the flashes are obvious.
“The key is, you’ve got to stay together through the fire,” Cronin said. “A lot of people start running when that fire starts, but if you recruit good kids, they’ll stay together, especially because they know no matter how much people see my emotion or whatever, they know I care about them and we’re here to make them better.”
UCLA was billed as the third-best team in the Pac-12 in the preseason polls, and that looked like a whiff in December. With seven games left in regular-season play, UCLA sits … tied for third with an 8-5 mark in Pac-12 play. That team who lost eight of nine games between Dec. 9 and Jan. 11 and this current iteration of UCLA basketball feel miles apart.
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The Cronin strut is back, and so is Andrews’ pull-up jumper. A once-drowning season found a lifejacket.
“You just see we’ve become a different team, right,” Cronin said.
We see, Mick. We see.
The Daily Dish is a daily college basketball column by a rotating cast of 247Sports writers on the biggest stories of the day in the sport and will run through the NCAA Tournament championship in April.
