Cal Basketball's Offseason Mission: Retain Key Players, Add a General Manager

Minutes after Cal's sobering second-round NIT loss to Saint Joseph's on Sunday, Golden Bears' junior guard Dai Dai Ames was asked whether he plans to be at Cal next season.

"Yeah, I believe I should be here next year," he said.

That's a promising response for Cal, even though it does not guarantee Ames will be back in Berkeley for the 2026-27 season.

Whether Mark Madsen and Cal can retain the key players from this season will go a long way toward determining whether this year's 22-12 season, representing the most Cal wins in 10 years, was just a blip on the radar or an indication that Madsen is building an elite basketball program.

Adding a general manager to the basketball program would help in that regard. Madsen is without a general manager at the moment and is actively working to bring one in, saying the addition of a general manager would be “huge.”

Although it will be difficult for Cal to find a basketball GM who fits the job description as perfectly as Ron Rivera does for Cal football, there are names of potential Cal GMs that would demonstrate that Cal’s administration has lofty goals for basketball. More importantly, a GM would help Cal navigate the complicated transfer portal world that rules college hoops today.

Cal exceeded expectations this season, finishing with a 9-9 conference record and nearly getting into the NCAA tournament for the first time in 10 years despite being picked to finish 16th in the 18-team conference in the preseason ACC poll.

And Madsen did it with four starters who transferred in from other schools where they had modest individual success a year ago.

“We took a step this season,” Madsen said. “We felt like we could have taken an even bigger step.”

That bigger step for next season would require keeping key players like Ames, sophomore guard Justin Pippen, sophomore center Lee Dort, freshman guard TT Carr and highly touted freshman guard Jovani Ruff, who redshirted this season. Rytis Petraitis is eligible for a redshirt season after not playing more than 30 percent of Cal's games and not playing at all in the second half of the Bears' 2025-26 season., so he is expected to return to Cal next season.

“One of the first things we’re going to talk about is retention,” Madsen said. “I think that this year, this coming spring, I believe that we will retain more in terms of actual players and in terms of key players than we ever have since I’ve been here at Cal.”

The Bears’ top two priorities for retention are Ames and Pippen, who will appeal to a lot of top-notch teams that have the money to attract them.

Virtually every college team loses an important player or two to the transfer portal every year, and Miami had almost an entirely new roster this season under first-year coach Jai Lucas, who took a team that went 7-24 last season to one that finished 26-9 this season.

Miami’s success in the protal is probably not a blueprint for Cal, though.

The Bears have been hit particularly hard by transfers leaving Cal, forcing Madsen to start from scratch every year.

Cal’s two best players from last season – Antrej Stojakovic and Jeremiah Wilkinson – transferred out and showed their value for their new teams in the NCAA tournament. Stojakovic scored 21 points to help Illinois beat TCU in the second round, and Wilkinson scored 30 points in Georgia’s loss to Saint Louis.

Cal needs to maintain the basic structure of this season’s roster to have a foundation on which Madsen can build. And we won't know which players will be staying at Cal until the men's basketball transfer portal opens on April 7 and closes on April 21, although some players' intentions will become public before then.

Before thinking about player retention, however, Cal needs to focus on keeping Madsen, who in his third season at Cal created a 22-win team three years after taking over a Bears squad that had gone 3-29 the season before he came to Berkeley.

He has appeal to other schools, and reports earlier this month suggested Madsen might be a good fit for the Arizona State coaching vacancy. But that concern vanished on Monday when Saint Mary's coach Randy Bennett was named the Sun Devils new head coach. Madsen certainly does not talk like a coach who is focused on anything other than turning Cal into a national player.

Madsen is under contract at Cal through the 2029-30 season, although that means little these days as far as coaching movement.

Besides retaining most of his key players, Madsen again will have to bring in a few transfers who are talented and fit what he is trying to build. He has done well in that regard in his three seasons at Cal, molding four transfers into effective starters this year, adding Stojakovic from Stanford last season and turning Texas Tech transfer Jaylon Tyson into a first-round NBA draft pick in his one season at Cal two years ago.

It would help if incoming Cal freshman Dionycius Bakare has an immediate impact next season, but that is asking a lot from this three-star recruit. However, a bigger issue is whether Cal can sign four-star guard Quincy Wadley, a class of 2026 prospect who is still uncommitted and seems to be deciding between Cal and BYU, although he has other offers on his plate.

Improving Cal’s team defense will be a major offseason issue for Madsen. The Bears’ defense was effective at time this season, but there were a number of times – such as the second half of Sunday’s loss to Saint Joseph’s when the Bears let a 19-point, second-half lead slip away – when Cal’s defense did get the job done.

It all leads to the big question facing Cal basketball in this offseason:

Was the 2025-26 season an omen of things to come or simply a one-off?