Cal Basketball: Jalen Celestine May Not Play This Season, Mark Fox Says For 1st Time
Cal coach Mark Fox hopes DeJuan Clayton and Sam Alajiki will be healthy enough to play Saturday when the Bears try to complete a season sweep of Stanford with a 7 p.m. matchup at Maples Pavilion.
But for the first time, Fox suggested junior guard Jalen Celestine, who has yet to play after offseason knee surgery, may not return this season.
“I’d say DeJuan and Sam are probably day-to-day,” Fox says in the video above after the Bears’ loss to Oregon State on Sunday. “Jalen . . . not so much.”
Asked if it’s possible Celestine may not play at all this season, Fox conceded, “Unfortunately, I think there’s a chance for that, yeah.”
Injuries are not the only cause of the Bears’ 3-17 record, including a 2-7 start to the Pac-12 schedule. But they certainly haven’t helped.
Celestine, who was the team’s top returning scorer from a year ago, albeit just a 7.5 points-per-game contributor, has missed all 20 games. But at 6-foot-7, he provided a long and athletic player on the wing who was just starting to evolve last season. He averaged 10.0 points over the Bears' final nine games, including a 20-point performance against Washington State.
Senior reserve guard Jarred Hyder was declared out for the season in early December after undergoing back surgery.
Fox expected transfer guards Devin Askew and DeJuan Clayton to provide a boost to the offense, but Askew has been sidelined three different times totaling seven games due to illness or a foot injury. Clayton sat out the first 13 games while recovering from a hamstring injury, then was back on the shelf for the OSU game after experiencing a migraine earlier in the week.
Alajiki, who sat out two games over Thanksgiving while in concussion protocol, missed Sunday’s game with an undisclosed health issue. Freshman post ND Okafor was sidelined for two games in December by COVID-19 protocols and sophomore guard Marsalis Roberson missed one game due to injury.
Altogether, Cal players have combined to miss 67 games for health reasons — 40 of those attributed to Celestine and Hyder.
Cal needs three more victories just to avoid the program’s lowest win total in modern history. The Bears’ 8-21 record in 1978-79 represented their fewest wins since 1918-19 when they posted just six victories, but actually had a winning ledger at 6-3.
On Saturday at Stanford (7-12, 2-7), the Bears will try to end a four-game losing streak that came on the heels of their Jan. 6 home victory over the Cardinal.
How do they replicate that performance?
“Just going back to when we played them, having the same approach with attention to detail in practice,” senior forward Kuany Kuany says in the video above. “Making sure all the little things matter so that we can go out there and perform and get the job done.”
Sounds good, but the 92-70 victory stands as an outlier among the Bears’ other performances this season. They shot a red-hot 73 percent (16 for 22) from the 3-point arc against the Cardinal. In 19 other games, they are converting barely 27 percent from deep.
Then there is the matter of winning away from home. Cal is 0-5 on their opponent’s floor this season, 0-7 in all games outside Haas Pavilion. The Bears were 2-12 away from home in 2021-22 and 3-12 the year before.
But senior point guard Joel Brown looks around the Pac-12 and sees surprising results that give him hope. Stanford, for instance, was 0-7 in conference games until sweeping the Oregon schools last week.
“The Pac-12 is an open field. A lot of teams are beating teams,” he said. “We have an opportunity for ourselves to go out there and do our best.”
Cover photo of Cal guard Jalen Celestine by CK Hicks, KLC fotos
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo
