LOS ANGELES — A little more than three minutes into the second half of a top-10 showdown with Arizona on Tuesday night, UCLA’s Jaime Jaquez Jr. got a bit casual and lost the basketball near midcourt. He then was outhustled into the backcourt for the ball, resulting in a turnover.
Bruins coach Mick Cronin does not do casual. He immediately turned to his bench and waved Jules Bernard to the scorer’s table to replace Jaquez.
Truth be told, Jaquez really doesn’t do casual, either. This was an uncharacteristic play from a three-year starter whose effort level usually tilts toward the extreme. But with Cronin, playing hard is not acceptable when playing hard is the standard.
“We’re going to win or die trying,” Cronin says. “UCLA is the greatest four letters in sports, and we want the players to use the brand. But there’s going to be no renting of the four letters. While here, we play to win, and there is no concession on that. That will be all that matters when you put the jersey on.”
After two-and-a-half minutes on the bench, Jaquez returned to the lineup as the personification of his coach’s win-or-die-trying credo. The 6'7" wing dominated the next 12 minutes—scoring eight straight UCLA points in one stretch, grabbing rebounds, blocking three shots, handing out two assists and making a steal. Jaquez wound up playing a team-high 34 minutes in a 75–59 takedown of the No. 3 team in the AP poll, doing all the things that make him a potential first-round NBA draft pick.
“Effort matters,” Cronin says.
The Bruins (14–2) are an anomaly in a transient sport—stable, old, coachable, committed. They are built around a core of Greater Los Angeles guys (Jaquez, Bernard, Cody Riley, David Singleton) and an Iowa point guard (Tyger Campbell) who have stayed in one place for years. They were recruited by the previous coach, Steve Alford, and could have scattered when he was fired. Cronin arrived from Cincinnati in 2019 with an unflinching intensity that his new players would have to match.
“They stayed, and they let me coach them,” he says.
The remaining group has been joined by a couple of transfers coming back home (Johnny Juzang from Kentucky and Myles Johnson from Rutgers), a sophomore from Riverside (Jaylen Clark) and a freshman from Long Beach (Peyton Watson). There are local high school teams that are less authentically Angeleno than the Bruins.
But these guys are no SoCal softies; their determined run to within a half-court shot of the national championship game last year showcased a ferocious, competitive drive. That team was one of just five NCAA tournament No. 11 seeds ever to make the men’s Final Four, and only an epic Jalen Suggs bomb at the buzzer kept it from becoming the first to play in the title game.
“When we were in the bubble [in Indianapolis], it got to the point where I thought we were going to win the national championship,” Cronin says. “Because these guys will not give up.”
That stirring run marked the end of an exceedingly rare phenomenon: UCLA as an underdog. It was fun while it lasted in 2021, but the program that has won more men’s national championships than any, the bluest of bluebloods, was back. And when Juzang turned down the NBA last summer to stay in school with the rest of the core group, the sky-high expectations of old returned as well.
Thus began a new challenge: staying engaged and excited every step of the march toward March. That included momentum-killing COVID-19 issues that led to the postponement or cancellation of five games and left Pauley Pavilion devoid of fans for weeks. Ultimately, there is an innate knowledge of the season endgame: If a team knows that it can go from the First Four to the Final Four, how much does seeding matter?
Cronin’s job is to flush complacency from the locker room while still aiming to hit maximum stride in the postseason. A lifelong horse racing enthusiast, he recently bought a thoroughbred and named it Bruin Magic. Cronin sees his basketball team the way a trainer sees a talented young colt he’s trying to guide toward peaking at the Kentucky Derby.
“I know they have another gear,” he says. “They just haven’t given it to me yet.”