You won't find a more schizophrenic team in college hoops right now than the California Golden Bears. One night they are playing an elite Wisconsin team tough and the next night they lose to a 2-10 CSU-Bakersfield team that plays in a very weak WAC conference. That same schizophrenic play continued this past weekend when Cal defeated #21 ranked Washington before falling to a very weak Washington State team.
The easy answer to diagnosing Cal's inconsistent play is that they don't have Jabari Bird healthy, but that feels more like a cop-out than it does a legitimate diagnosis. Jabari Bird is expected to be back from his stress fracture injury in less than two weeks and possibly as soon as the Stanford game on the 14th, and I am not at all confident that his return will cure Cal's up and down play.
I don't deny that Jabari Bird's absence has hurt this team. He's the third scoring option behind Jordan Mathews and Tyrone Wallace who both are having a hard time getting solid offensive production out of anybody else on the team including senior power forward David Kravish. I get all of that. I also understand that Bird has tremendous upside and that it may only be a matter of time before he explodes into a lottery pick in the NBA draft. Losing a guy like that really hurts a team like Cal, who quite honestly doesn't have much talent outside of their starting five.
But as I stated above, there is more to Cal's woes than just Jabari Bird's absence. There seems to be an apathy on the team that has the tendency to show up at the beginning of games. I don't know why, but at the beginning of every game, Cal gets off to these really slow starts in which they struggle to score the basketball and get into an offensive rhythm.
One thing I've noticed is that is that teams are using zones and it takes Cal a while to figure them out. CSU-Bakersfield for example used a zone as did Princeton and both times it was very effective against Cal. The goal of a zone defense, if done properly is to defend the perimeter and force teams to beat you from the outside.
Since Cal's only reliable three-point shooter is Jordan Mathews, it makes sense that a zone would be effective against them. Especially when guys like Sam Singer and Roger Moute a Bidias resort to jacking up threes instead of driving and attacking the basket. The zone also appears to lull Tyrone Wallace to sleep and make him play more passively, keeping him out of the lane and making him pass the ball to those guys who can't shoot well. So all across the board, the zone is certainly giving Cal trouble.
But the biggest problem that I've noticed hasn't been Cal's offensive play, as poor as that has been. It has actually been Cal's poor defense, especially on the interior. Cal's defense on the perimeter is pretty solid. Tyrone Wallace, Roger Moute a Bidias, and Sam Singer are all fantastic perimeter defenders, but inside Christian Behrens and David Kravish are having a hard time playing defense.
If there is a common link between the CSU-Baksersfield loss and the Washington State loss, it is that Cal got murdered in the paint like King Duncan in Macbeth. Washington State power forward Josh Hawkinson had 18 points and 13 rebounds against them and CSU-Bakersfield center Aly Ahmed had 19 points and 10 rebounds against them. Cal's inability to stop both players is what ultimately did them in and in my opinion is the biggest reason why they lost.
David Kravish has a track record of playing good defense inside, but Christian Behrens on the other hand doesn't have that same track record and he unfortunately is undersized for a power forward, which makes it difficult for him to play defense. This is why I think Cuonzo Martin needs to play freshman center Kingsley Okoroh more, who stands at 7'1 and has actually played well defensively in the paint.
Does playing Kingsley Okoroh more solve Cal's interior defensive woes? It may not totally get rid of the problem, but I think it would alleviate the problem substantially. Against CSU-Bakersfield Okoroh only played 10 minutes and against Washington State he played only 15 minutes. Given that Kingsley Okoroh and David Kravish are the only legitimate post defenders on the team, it stands to reason that Okoroh has to get more than 15 minutes of action if Cal doesn't want to get killed in the paint.
I personally think if his minutes were ramped up to around 25 minutes per game, Cal would allow a lot fewer points in the paint, which I think would make them a lot better. If he were playing those kind of minutes against CSU-Bakersfield and Washington State, Aly Ahmed and Josh Hawkinson would not have had the kind of success that they did, which likely means Cal wins both games.
If Cal wants to have success on this week's road trip @USC (1/7) and @UCLA (1/11), they have to make sure they don't get killed in the paint. The way to make sure that doesn't happen is to play Kingsley Okoroh more and possibly start him. He's a 7'1 center with a knack for blocking shots which is what they need more of. Giving him more minutes doesn't solve all of their problems, but it should prevent teams from having so much success inside.
USC and UCLA are not impressive this year and Cal on paper has way more talent than either team. But both UCLA and USC have guys who can kill Cal inside, which is why I'm worried. USC has a kid named Nikola Jovanovic who as I recall gave Cal trouble inside last year and UCLA has a kid named Kevon Looney who can be a handful inside. If those guys both go off against Cal, Cal will likely lose both games. If Cal can contain them and keep them pinned below or right at their season averages, then Cal will likely win. It's that simple.
---Ben Parker: follow me on twitter @nba_lord
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