Cal Basketball: Joel Brown to Give Bears a Different Look at Point Guard Next Year

'Joel's game is wired differently' than senior scoring point Paris Austin

While careful to note that Cal needed senior Paris Austin’s scoring this season, coach Mark Fox knows the Bears will have a different look at point guard next year.

The man with the ball in his hands most often will be Joel Brown, who started 17 games this season as a freshman and is more of a pass-first point guard than Austin. The 6-foot-2, 190-pounder from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, is the only point guard on the roster who is scheduled to return next season.

“I don’t want to appear to be critical of Paris because we needed his scoring. Joel’s game is wired differently,” Fox said in a teleconference conversation with beat writers. “Joel learned some things from Paris because Paris did some things really well.”

In fact, Fox has gone out of his way to praise the way Austin, the former Bishop O’Dowd High standout and Boise State transfer, adapted his game to a new coaching staff and became a much-needed secondary scoring option.

Austin dealt well with coming off the bench to open the season, using it as motivational fuel to work his way back into a starting role. He averaged 12.0 points over the final 18 games.

Mark Fox talks about Brown's performance after being injured vs. Utah:

But Austin never was going to be a pure point guard who sublimates his offense to involve others. He worked at it but he is a scorer at heart.

Brown will bring a different approach to the position. Fox praised his defensive abilities and called his 1.65-to-1 assist-to-turnover “very positive” for a freshman floor leader.

“Joel’s a very bright young man. I think his intelligence is an advantage for him. We’ll see it within our team when he's at the lead guard spot,” Fox said. “It’s a position where you have to make a lot of decisions.”

No moment in Brown’s season more impressed his coach than when he suffered a cut between two fingers in the Bears’ home game against Utah. Brown went to the locker room to receive stitches and returned to contribute 11 points, two rebounds, two assists and a timely late steal to an 86-79 overtime victory.

“That game showed a lot of competitive maturity he learned throughout the year,” Fox said.

Brown’s most glaring shortcoming at this point seems to be his shooting ability. He converted just 34 percent from the field, 31 percent on 3-pointers and was worst on the team from the free-throw line at 40 percent, not a good quality for a point guard.

Fox said he worked with Brown on his shooting during the conference schedule and saw it improve. “He shot far better in practice. Was he confident enough in games? I think that was coming,” Fox said. ‘I think that will come for him next year.”

Brown’s improvement late in the season was incremental: 40/38/50 percent over the final 12 games.

Fox said improving the team’s shooting ability will be a major roster-wide off-season priority.

All five freshman saw action this season, although Brown and center/forward Lars Thiemann got the most consistent playing time. Forwards Kuany Kuany and D.J. Thorpe saw increased opportunity late in the season while guard Dimitrios Klonaras played by far the least (3.6 minutes per his 20 games).

“I think each one of those freshmen have made an impact on our team,” Fox said. “I look back, and Lars and Dimitrios weren't able to be here in the summer — they were with their national teams. That probably prohibited them from jumping out of the gate as well as we maybe wanted them to.”

Even so, the 7-foot, 248-pound Thiemann started 18 games, including the first eight and another stretch of seven straight through the month of January. Kuany was limited early by a leg injury, and Thorpe was impacted an ankle injury that cost him a portion of his high school senior season.

Fox pointed to “tremendous improvements” made by Thorpe, who had nine points at USC and nine rebounds at UCLA two days later. Kuany, who appears to be the team’s most athletic player, showed glimpses of his lively explosiveness.

“The season for most of them got really long and they had some valleys,” Fox said. “When the group looks back at their freshmen years, they probably had more chances to go through those things because our team was so young and we were rebuilding.

“All of them were able to get terrific experience, an understanding of what it takes not only to play in the Pac-12 but what it takes to win.”