by Jordan Beckley
Mick Cronin has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success in his first four years at UCLA. With the core he built his early success on all gone, Mick is following a rival coach’s strategy in an attempt to continue winning in Westwood.
Conference Realignment has shaken up the College sporting world. While most conferences were adding programs for football, the Big 12 added several college basketball powers. Even if the Big Ten’s intent was to add four great football programs, they ended up adding some pretty good basketball programs too.
Oregon recruits like an elite program and recently went to the Final Four in 2017 with two Sweet 16 appearances since then.
USC and Andy Enfield have been regularly putting dudes into the league and were on the doorstep of the Final Four with Evan Mobley in 2021.
Finally, there is UCLA and Mick Cronin. The Bruins are one of the most decorated programs in CBB history. Cronin has been restoring the shine to the UCLA gold that John Wooden first brought to the program.
Cronin’s journey to become UCLAs head coach has been unexpected and undoubtedly successful. As he turns the page on his first chapter at UCLA, Cronin is pivoting to a new strategy that is unexpected. Will it be successful?
Cronin’s surprising hire and success
Mick Cronin was hired to become the Head Basketball coach of the UCLA Bruins in April of 2019. The University hired him after a long drawn out hiring process that was embarrassing for one of the blue blood programs of Basketball. The UCLA job was not one coaches envied.
Ben Howland had tremendous success in the early 2000s making three straight Final Fours and was tossed aside 5 years later. Steve Alford was persecuted his entire tenure despite several fairly successful seasons.
It is hard to please the UCLA fanbase. The fanbase was not pleased with the hiring of Mick Cronin. He was perceived to be the 7th option and seemed to be a weird fit.
Cronin had been the head coach of Cincinnati for the past 13 seasons. Coach Cronin had enjoyed a good amount of success winning the American conference twice in the regular season, the conference tournament twice, and appearing in the NCAA tournament 9 straight seasons leading up to his hire at Westwood. Despite making the tourney 9 times he had only made one Sweet 16.
Fans weren’t excited heading into the 2019-20 season. Cronin started his UCLA tenure with an okay season that abruptly finished with the Covid-19 cancellations. That team was highlighted by a couple freshmen in Tyger Campbell, Jaime Jacquez, and Shaquille O’Neal’s son Shareef. Shareef didn’t stick around, but Kentucky transfer Johnny Juzang did.
Juzang, Jacquez and Campbell formed a core for Cronin that would power them to a surprise Final Four run in Cronin’s second year. That 2020-21 team was this close to beating undefeated Gonzaga and it took a miracle shot from the Zags to beat the Bruins.
That core continued to succeed for Cronin as they collectively won 58 games the next two seasons, made two more Sweet 16s and won the PAC12 regular season for the first time since the 2012-13 season. However, the fan favorites and the core Cronin built his success off of are all gone.
Jaime, Tyger, Johnny, and David Singleton have all moved on, and now Cronin is moving onto a new recruiting strategy.
Going Abroad
The College Basketball community was unsure of UCLA heading into next season. People trusted Cronin, but the Bruins were losing a lot. That view has changed after Cronin had a slew of surprise commits this summer.
Cronin and the Bruins signed three players from overseas this offseason in Jan Vide, Aday Mara and Berke Buyuktuncel. All three players had a tremendous showing in the FIBA U19 showing. Vide is a confident and slippery guard from Slovenia. Mara is a 7’3” big with go-go-gadget arms capable of dunking in California from Spain. Buyuktuncel is a Turkish forward with a tremendous amount of polish for an 18 year old. Buyuktuncel even finished on the All-Tournament team and he helped Turkey beat USA (and a whole mess of top recruits) for 3rd place.
Mick Cronin had already signed 4 Top-100 recruits before adding that trio of international flavor. The highest rated of those recruits is another international player in French guard Ilane Fibleuil. It is the second straight year that the Bruins will have a non-US citizen as their highest recruit. In the 2022 class, the highest rated recruit was Adem Bona, a McDonald’s All-American who played in the US for two seasons. Bona is originally from Nigeria and has represented Turkey internationally.
This overseas turn in recruiting is a trend that is gaining popularity in College Basketball. Big Ten teams like Nebraska, Purdue, Michigan and Illinois have all grabbed international players in recent classes. Penn State’s Bragi Gudmundsson and Minnesota’s Kristupas Keinys are both late recruiting adds from this class coming from another continent. The Big Ten has barely tapped the potential that the overseas soil provides.
The gold standard of international recruiting has been UCLA’s PAC-12 rival Arizona and Head Coach Tommy Lloyd. For years, Lloyd helped bring in International studs for Mark Few and Gonzaga. Players like Domantas Sabonis, Przemek Karnowski and Rui Hachimura were some of Lloyd’s finest recruits. Fast forward and Lloyd would use his international edge to build Arizona back up. The Wildcats became Overseas U with guys like Bennedict Mathurin, Kerr Kriisa, Azuolas Tubelis, Oumar Ballo and more coming from international sources.
The success Arizona has had the past two seasons (61-11 record) has to have inspired Mick Cronin. This Summer Cronin hired Nemanja Jovanovic to be the Director of International Recruiting for UCLA. Buyuktncel and Mara committed soon after this hire. Jovanovic has over two decades of coaching experience in College Basketball and overseas with deep ties in Spain, Denmark, Sweden and especially Serbia.
Cronin has committed to the international market as a resource with the hire of Jovanovic and it is a great play. It is one thing to convince a kid from Turkey to come play in West Lafayette, IN or Champaign, IL. It is probably a walk in the park to convince them to come to beautiful and sunny Los Angeles.
The Next Challenges: Assimilation to America & to the Big Ten
UCLA will be playing one more season in what will be a farewell tour for all of the PAC-12 and then join the Big Ten. They won’t be competing with Arizona anymore. Now, Cronin’s squad will be the school with all the international players in their conference.
The Big Ten recruits decently well as a conference, but they often beat themselves up and cannibalize the midwestern talent without pulling enough of the players from other regions. UCLA will have all the lure in the states that those 11 banners bring, but could also bring in 3 international NBA prospects each class too.
Now the challenge for UCLA’s new recruits will be cultural assimilation. Language barriers will exist. Communication could be affected. Can you get these guys making a pit stop in College Basketball to care about a game in Evanston as much as Brooks Barnhizer will? With these guys representing their countries overseas in the offseason, you are missing crucial practices to build chemistry. How do you make semi-professional basketball players from another country feel at home the way an 18 year old American does in his first dorm room?
Tommy Lloyd has lived and breathed international hoops for over a decade. How Cronin will adapt as a coach to his change in recruiting philosophy is yet to be seen.
It could be the huge swing that brings UCLA its twelfth title. Or it could end up being an ineffective waste of time and resources.
With the workaholic, success driven nature of Mick Cronin, I believe UCLA’s international pivot is more likely to create a dominant team that will be a force for years to come.