Cal Men's Basketball: Golden Bears Can't Score without Andre Kelly

The Bears fall 57-50 in a slow, defensive rock fight

Cal Basketball @CalMBBall

Dig in. Bears down 45-37 with 5:28 left.

Andre Kelly was out, and Cal had their worst offensive performance of the season.

I don’t want to oversimplify things here, but I also don’t want to overcomplicate them either. On Monday I tried to break down why losing Andre could be pretty damaging, and lo what pain has been wrought.

In an excruciatingly slow 60 possession game, Cal shot 40% on their 2 pointers, 21% on their 3 pointers, recorded only four offensive rebounds, and didn’t get to the line very much. Add it all up and you’ve got .83 points/possession, which includes 5 points on two late buckets when the game was well finished.

As you would expect without the only player on the roster who can regularly create good shots near the basket, Cal struggled all night long for decent looks, settling for a variety of jumpers and late shot clock heaves.

Stanford themselves struggled to score for the vast majority of the game, and while Stanford led for the final 21 minutes of the game, Cal climbed within a possession of Stanford multiple times. But starting with 8 minutes left in the game, Stanford’s offense finally picked up. The Cardinal made 7 of their last 11 shots and rebounded two of their own misses, ending up with just one empty possession during the stretch run of the game. Cal’s offense couldn’t keep up.

Stanford stretched the lead out to eight, Cal again showed that they’re not able to play fast basketball when the situation calls for it, and Stanford was able to close the game out without any difficulty.

---

I wrote the following in my season preview article:

We know the reality for the program right now, and harping on that is depressing without serving any particular function.

If you expect me to start and end every article talking about why Mark Fox should be replaced, you’ll be disappointed. But don’t worry, ticket sales at Haas Pavilion will do the talking for us.

I’ve made good on that promise so far. But we’re now 70% through the regular season and one game past the halfway point of the Pac-12 schedule. Also, we just lost to Stanford, as a part of an active eight game losing streak. This is as good a time as any to briefly break this self-imposed rule.

Andre Kelly is intrinsically critical to Cal’s chances generally, and to their offense specifically. That has been clear since early in the season. But that’s less an excuse, and more of a statement about Mark Fox’s (in)ability to recruit and build an offense three years into his tenure at Cal.

If you watched the game, you heard Ted Robinson and Don MacLean go to bat for Mark Fox. If you’ve watched any other Cal game on the Pac-12 Network, you’ve heard other announcers do the same.

The bulk of the argument? Mark Fox has Cal playing hard and competing in every game, and it’s clear that Cal is so much better than in prior years. A semi-unspoken aspect of this is that Cal is significantly less big/tall/fast/athletic/talented/etc. than their Pac-12 opponents, and Mark Fox should be lauded for wringing as much as he has out of his roster.

This is entirely typical and unsurprising, because the Pac-12 Network is not an unbiased source, and because the coaching fraternity and the announcer fraternity are nearly overlapping Venn diagrams of people who are completely unwilling to say anything the least bit negative about each other. But I dispute the premise.

For one thing, Cal isn’t a better team this year than last year, once you account for the fact that the 2022 Bears got to play a full slate of non-conference games that included a bunch of very winnable games:

True, Mark Fox has improved Cal from the depth of the Wyking Jones era. But I’d like to think that Cal aspires to a bit more than that.

Meanwhile, all but three players on the roster were 100% recruited by the current coaching staff, and the star player whose injury hurt the Bears so badly is a holdover recruit from Wyking Jones.

In short, we’re nearly three years in, and Cal’s on-court success is still very much tied into the availability of players recruited by Wyking Jones. That’s not an encouraging sign for the current coaching regime.

---

This game was the first in a long stretch of games in the 2nd half of the conference schedule that are winnable, which wasn’t particularly the case over the last few weeks. I’d only peg two games (at Oregon, at Arizona) as games that I’d be meaningfully surprised if Cal ended up winning.

The problem is that that there aren’t any games on the schedule that Cal couldn’t easily lose. But the single most winnable game the rest of the way is probably Thursday’s home game against Washington (if you said it was at home vs. Utah I wouldn’t argue).

Winnable is relative, of course. If Andre Kelly is still out, that could certainly swing the game. Time to cross your fingers and hope for a fast healing leg!