Opinion: After Eight Years, Cal Men's Basketball Now an Average Major-Conference Team Again

Celebrating a milestone along the path of a long-term rebuilding effort

photo via @calmbball twitter

During the 2016-17 basketball season, Cal fans probably didn’t think they would eventually look back on that year with anything approaching nostalgia.

Those Bears were the dictionary definition of power conference average. 21 wins. A roughly .500 conference record (10-8) and a semi-final exit in the Pac-12 tournament. No particularly great wins - the best was a road win over a USC team that just barely scraped into the tournament. No truly terrible losses, though a road loss to a meh Stanford team rankled. Enough to hang around on the bubble, but late-season woes consigned Cal to an NIT 1 seed, then a lifeless loss to CSU Bakersfield with multiple starters sitting out.

It was, at the time, a mild disappointment with talented players like Ivan Rabb and Jabari Bird failing to coalesce into something more than average. It was, if we all knew what would follow, a season worth savoring.

We don’t need to go too deep into what happened across the next eight seasons following the departure of almost everybody associated with that very average season. Cal has a collective record of 81-172 (37-117 in conference) across those eight years, never finished any season above .500 overall or in conference, and never finished in the top 100 of any adjusted efficiency metric.

That ignominy is over. In his first season, Mark Madsen took over an almost unfathomably bad team and turned them into an unremarkably below-average power conference team, then treaded water for another season. This year, he’s taken another step forward to average.

What does average mean? Well, to start with, it means a winning record. That’s not technically guaranteed, but for the Bears to finish below .500 they would have to go 5-16 the rest of the way and that’s extremely unlikely.

It means a team without any bad losses. Cal’s schedule so far this year has been pretty weak (314th so far per Kenpom) but the Bears haven’t tripped up against any lower conference opposition for the first time since 2016 en route to this 10-1 start.

Average can also be measured by adjusted efficiency. Cal is currently 76th in the country in the Kenpom rankings, good for 13th in the ACC, just a hair behind a number of other programs smushed together in the middle of the conference. It’s Cal’s highest Kenpom ranking since (obviously enough) 2017.

If it sounds like I’m damning the Bears with faint praise by calling them ‘average,’ I don’t intend to. Average power conference teams are typically somewhere near the bubble for the NCAA tournament, and Cal finds itself on the edges of that conversation thanks to a valuable win over UCLA. Cal has plenty left to do to give themselves a solid chance to make the tournament, but they have enough talent and enough chances on the schedule that making the tournament isn’t a pipe dream for the first time in nearly a decade.

No, being an average team is actually pretty great. Average power teams have interesting talent and fun developmental stories. We get to enjoy watching Justin Pippen grow from a freshman stuck on the bench at Michigan to a sophomore starting to tap into intriguing playmaking skills. We get to enjoy watching Lee Dort become an efficient big man with a sudden flair for an assist. We get to watch Dai Dai Ames, Chris Bell, and John Camden light it up from deep as maybe the best 3 point shooting trio in college hoops.

Average means that your team can weather the occasional injury, as Cal has done over the last few games without Justin Pippen and defensive energizer Rytis Petraitis.

Sure, there can be mild frustrations following an average power team. Cal’s defensive performance at Kansas State was pretty rough. There have been some blah performances, like when the Bears let bad teams like Presbyterian and Northwestern State hang around deep into the 2nd half.

But there are also joyous games, like when the Bears blitzed UCLA from deep for a cathartic win that sent Mick Cronin into a patented rant that makes you wonder why anybody would choose to play for the most miserable coach in the country.

And average power teams have the potential to grow into something more special. Last year, BYU was a pretty average power conference team at mid-season, with an 11-6 record that had them hanging on the edge of the bubble. They found themselves in late January, ended the regular season on a 12-2 run, grabbed a 6 seed, and made the Sweet 16.

Yep, power team average is pretty cool even if we hadn’t had to suffer through six years of hell and two years of halting progress during a rebuild from absolute rock bottom. And in two weeks, the real fun begins when Louisville travels west to Berkeley and ACC play begins: conference games that matter because winning might mean basketball in March.