WATCH: Mick Cronin Talks Facing Illinois, UCLA's 3-Point Defense
UCLA men's basketball coach Mick Cronin spoke with reporters ahead of Wednesday morning's practice session at the Mo Ostin Basketball Center. Cronin talked about the Bruins leaving Pauley Pavilion for the first time this season, the importance of playing high quality teams in the nonconference, how Brad Underwood has run Illinois over the years, what goes into scouting an opponent with new pieces, Dylan Andrews' performance through three games and how the Bruins avoid getting upset in buy games.
What are you most eager to see this weekend besides two wins?
Well, look, everybody wants to win and you want to improve, but it’s so early. You know, it’s your first game out of your own arena—probably for the other team as well, I’m sure, yeah—you know, especially when you’ve got a young team. Like last year I wasn’t worried how we would handle that, but obviously we have a lot of guys who haven’t played a game outside of Pauley Pavilion—or against another high-major opponent, so it’s all part of the process. It’s time to get it going, time to get it started, you know? College basketball, these games matter. If you can win and continue to win, then they would matter to help you at NCAA tournament time. You know, the more you win, the more your wins actually matter—I know that sounds kind of obviously obvious, but if you don’t have a good year, a couple of big wins in the nonleague wouldn’t matter. If you end up having a bad year, you’re not going to make the tournament anyway, so this stuff, it’s great. Look, you come to UCLA to play against top-25 opponents, you come to UCLA, you want to play on the big stage, you want to try to have a chance to go to Final Fours, go to titles, so to do that, you’ve got to play good teams, so Illinois, I believe back-to-back Big Ten champs, just an unbelievable run of amount of wins they’ve had in the Big Ten that Brad’s done over the last three years. He’s a proven winner.
What do you see in them?
A lot of new guys. A lot of new guys. But when you have a good coach like Brad, it’s an immediate adjustment without Coffey in the middle, it’s an immediate adjustment to their style, trying to maximize their versatility, so he's just a really good coach, I have a tremendous amount of respect for him as a coach, so that being said, they have a lot of new pieces, even more so than we do. You know, we obviously have guys back who played on a Final Four team, the majority of his guys are gone, so he’s trying to piece it together, you know, his leading scorer’s a transfer, he’s got freshman guards, so I suspect—first of all, it’s going to be a tough game. Whenever you play his teams, they play hard, but they are a team that will improve as the year goes on. I think 11 new guys or something crazy like that, yeah, he’s got a lot of new guys. So they’ll continue to get better as they adjust and their guys get adjusted and they figure it out, but these early season games are good—you’ve got to find out where you’re at and compete against a high-level team.
How much tougher to game plan at this point in the season against a team with a bunch of new guys?
Uh, just for Sacramento State, they had a new coach and we’re guessing what he did in 2019 when he was a head coach and then was an assistant for a couple of years. They’ve played some games already, they’ve played an exhibition and three home games, so nowadays everything’s online. But the difference is, neither one of us has really been tested, so who’s going to be their go-to man when it matters? It’s a little bit different when you’re playing and game and coaching a game—when you see me coaching a game like the other night and I know we’re going to win, once I know we’re going to win I almost coach it like it’s practice because you’ve got to get something out of it, you’ve got to use it as a practice to improve and get ready—and I’m sure Brad’s doing the same thing—versus when you’re going to be in a dogfight and OK, now, who are you going to go on offense instead of practicing? You know, what are you going to do defensively instead of trying to maybe let your guy post up one on one, you’re trying to maybe teach a guy and let a guy learn, so that will be different.
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