Mark Madsen: ‘I Want to Play Fast’

Mark Madsen may have said it initially just because it was what Cal wanted to hear.

“I want to play fast. I want to play up-tempo,” Madsen said during his introductory press conference Monday.

But he kept saying it, in many forms, in different contexts, again and again. He wants to push the pace.

That style is in direct contrast to what Cal used the past four seasons under Mark Fox, who tried to make up for a lack of talent with a slow-down approach that kept the score down.

While finishing with a 3-29 record this past season, Cal averaged 58.3 points, which ranked dead last among the 352 Division I schools. The Bears scored 70 points or more just four time, and not in any of their final 14 games.

Madsen’s 2022-23 team, the Utah Valley Wolverines, finished with a 28-9 record and averaged 77.4 points. They scored nearly 1,000 more point than Cal (997 more to be exact). They scored 70 points or more 30 times, and surpassed the 70-point mark in each of their final eight games.

“Style of play: I want to play up-tempo,” Madsen said. “There’s going to be a lot of structure, but there’s also going to be a lot of freedom. One thing you hear, especially to young players in the NBA: ‘Don’t be a robot.’ If at any time you can take candy from a baby, you do it and you go get the layup.”

Devin Askew, who was the Bears’ leading scorer before missing the second half of the season with a hernia, loved to hear that.

“It fits right into my game,” said Askew, “so I’m super excited.”

Askew does not plan to transfer, and Jalen Celestine, who missed the entire 2022-23 season following knee surgery, is staying at Cal too. Those are two players Madsen won’t have to re-recruit. And he figures the uptempo style will help when he recruits high school players or players in the transfer portal.

“Very few players want to play slow,” Madsen said. “I don’t recruit slow players. I don’t want slow big guys. If you have fast big guys, it opens up layups and wide-open threes in the corner. Speed, decision-making, tempo – those are the things I’m excited to recruit and excited to implement.”

And Madsen plans to work the transfer portal hard to turn the Cal program around in a hurry.

“You add three or four players from the portal, you add some players that already in the program, and you bring in a couple of young guys, make some tweaks, good things can happen quickly,” he said.

Madsen said several times that he expects to turn the Cal program around quickly.

“This thing can turn around very, very quickly,” he said, “and it will.”

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Mark Madsen talks in this video about his interest in Cal growing up, noting that his first recruting visit out of San Ramon Valley High School was at Cal, seeing Jason Kidd practice.

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