26 Comments

Sums up the situation perfectly, unfortunately

One concern I have is the two best recruits had a connection … Daws played for Madsen and was a teammate at TT, and one of our assistant coaches was from TT

Do we have an inside track on 2 top players again?

Have other schools see the potential of NIL, and build bigger NIL warchests?

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Time to bring in Myles Rice from WSU via the transfer portal.

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Via https://theathletic.com/5360188/2024/03/27/ncaa-transfers-portal-rankings-list/ (subscription req'd), 3 of the top 20 portal players played 2023-2024 at 'furd. Does that mean the portal players aren't high quality (since they didn't make the NCAA) or this situation arises from Haase's coaching? Would expect to see Madsen land 2 - 3!(n.b., not one of Cal's portal announcees is in the top 60 nationally.)

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Terrific analysis! It is a dynamic market, one which we must excel at winning each and every year. Hopefully we can stabilize the changes with talent that will hang around.

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Lots of insights in these posts. Love the fact Curtis and Larson are staying put. Both appear to be playing the long game. Excited to see how a year of development hits.

I still hold out hope JT stays and rocks the national scene next season. He legitimately is in any conversation about All-American lists.

Anyway, Newell and Brown failed their auditions last season. Decent role players when they needed to be impact players. Enough said.

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Well said. Huge offseason for Curtis…would love to see him and Larson work on low post moves/finishing around the tin, and free throw shooting…can these 2 give you quality minutes in the post against ACC bigs, and convert at the bucket and from the FT line?

As for Newell and Brown…it’s frustrating, and an unfortunate sign of the NIL/portal times. While neither have shown they’re ready to be difference makers at this level, their expected departures will rob Coach Madsen of much needed depth. Can’t blame them for seeking starting gigs, likely in a non-P4 league, and they were Fox recruits as opposed to the current staff…but they were expected rotation players, and Brown certainly had room to improve in his SO season. But to compete, this roster needs to replace scoring and get better at every position.

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It is all about NIL, simple as that. One does not need to be a good recruiter. One just has to show up at the in-home visit with a bag of cheddar (mula, dinero, juice; or whatever u wanna call cash these days). This article should have listed, a minimum of 5x, the following website: https://calegends.com/

The coaching profession, at the college level, is watered down to one simple phrase: "SHOW ME THE MONEY". Sad but true.

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YES! YES! YES, He can !!!

But the immense amount of $ UCLA and OREGON have to sweeten their offers to kids is really way out of proportion to fairness.

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We just need to get Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb every year, with Allen Crabbe, Tyrone Wallace, and David Kravish every other year.

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If Cal is going to make the Dance as a member of the ACC, this is probably what it is gonna take.

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Just get enough of a core every year to beat the likes of Montana St early on while integrating the newcomers

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"But here’s the thing: there is a cap on how good Cal can ever be if they have to replace 80+% of the rotation every year."

Utah State flipped its entire roster over, like literally every single rotation player was new, and made the round of 32. I'd take those results in a heartbeat until Cal's brand stabilizes.

"Consider: by one recruiting service’s metric last year, Cal was 9th in portal recruiting. "

I think this is an issue with roster construction than with transfer classes inherently not being able to get it done. We were unbalanced and had so many poor defenders on the team and no point guard once Askew went down. Madsen needed a talent infusion however he could get it.

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Utah St is an interesting case study, hell of a job from Sprinkle. But I stand by the larger point, which is that heavy portal usage is sometimes necessary but not an ideal way to build a team.

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Sprinkle was a fantastic hire. Before I knew Coach Madsen was a candidate, Danny was on my short list for the Cal job.

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It’s tough, because the days of developing players and building a program over time are gone, with Newell & Brown being the latest examples…2 kids that played steady minutes in a P5 program would rather leave because they weren’t guaranteed starting spots. Not much a coach can do about that.

OTOH, filling 6-7 scholarships and completely re-tooling a roster each season is unsustainable.

Hoping Madsen can land some transfers with eligibility remaining to stick around for multiple seasons…this was the thought process with Tyson, but he turned out to be good enough to jump to the League.

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This is truly a challenge for Madsen, but as you say well, it's hard to bet against him. It is so utterly different than the sport I've watched my entire life. And not for the better except purely for the players. Go Bears and Go Coach Madsen!

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I agree CalBear91. I'm a Cal Bear entering class of 85 and watching KJ play for 3 of his 4 years while living with him in Dwight Derby residence hall are things of the past. Players getting what they've always deserved is a morally critical "good" in this, but the sport has lost something we won't get back. That's not good or bad, it just is. Go Bears!

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Go Bears!

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Re: high school recruiting: while he hasn’t made a splash yet, we’re in the mix on the type of guys we have not been since Wyking. Feels only a matter of time before there’s a breakthrough. But I predict next year is gonna be rough regardless of the type of portal magic Madsen pulls off. I just hope that it can be a year to help set a strong foundation to build off of going forward.

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I fear underclassmen attrition is here to stay, tho.

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I realize that, but there's a place that exists between two extremes.

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Agreed, tho with the constant roster turnover via NIL and the transfer portal, I honestly don’t know what that looks like, at least for a school like Cal. Not surprisingly, most of Cal’s best teams in the past 30 years have been deep, and that depth is so hard to have nowadays.

Newell and Brown are the ones I’m speaking of specifically, and the one thing I keep coming back to is that neither was a Madsen recruit…that connection matters.

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Nicely articulated.

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”There is a cap on how good Cal can ever be if they have to replace 80+% of the rotation every year. . .

Can Madsen pull a rabbit out of his hat for the second off-season in a row?”

Mark Twain said, “I’m an old man and I’ve had a great many troubles in my life, most of which never happened.”

Although I understand and appreciate Mr. Kranz’s well-researched point, logic and experience tell us that with each year Mark Madsen coaches our Golden Bears, that 80 percent will decline to a much lower figure.

This will happen because of our head coach’s talent, enthusiasm, charisma and let’s-not-forget-that-contract-extension combined with a Berkeley education and the opportunity to live and play for one to fifteen* years in, as Jon Carroll described it, “the gd flower of democracy”.

Madsen didn’t work magic. He worked his ass off. Let’s not minimize the rewards of hard work, intelligence, inspiration and the brotherly bonds they form.

*15 is a rough guess depending on how loose the rules get.

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Thanks Nick.

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