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Cuonzo Martin Wants to Take Cal Basketball Back to the Future

It's been a long time since Cal was an especially relevant player in the Pac-12. With the help of a new coach and some blue-chip recruits, that might be changing.
Photo by Troy Babbitt-USA TODAY Sports

Cal hoops coach Cuonzo Martin must be one hell of a card player. On the sidelines, his tone and demeanor rarely change; his suits don't even seem to wrinkle. He isn't a tactician known for sui generis schemes like John Beilein or Shaka Smart. He isn't an icon who gets blue-chip recruits because of his, or his program's, name recognition. But in his second year with the Golden Bears, Martin looks like the right man for one of college basketball's most unusual jobs.

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For half a century, Cal has been trying to make up for lost time and find a replacement for legendary head coach Pete Newell, who led the Bears to consecutive national championship games in 1959 and 1960, during the primordial years of the NCAA era. Before he retired—at the age of 44, on the advice of his doctors—Newell was a legendary molder of (big) men; his name is on an award for best collegiate frontcourt player, and on basketball's preeminent big man camp. Newell built a strong program at Cal, won his final eight matchups against John Wooden's UCLA teams, and then watched helplessly as UCLA put the sport into a musty submission hold in the 60s. Newell's successor, Rene Herrerias, won half as many games in his first year as Newell had in his last, and lost 100 of his 192 games.

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Herrerias kicked off a three-decade NCAA Tournament drought. Cal was part of a brief golden era for Bay Area hoops in the 1990s, when Jason Kidd and Lamond Murray stayed home to wreck the Pac-12 while Run-TMC stomped their Adidas through NBA arenas. Still, it has been a long time since Cal really mattered in college basketball.

Martin is looking to change that, one possession at a time. "I'm used to a more grind-it-out defensive style," Martin explained to VICE Sports. "Play a half-court possession game, run in transition when you have the opportunity."

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And Martin does have an opportunity at U.S. News & World Report's No.1 public institution. The Bay Area hoops scene will never be as fertile to recruit from as Southern Cal is for UCLA, but Arizona's Pac-12 supremacy been aided by pickpocketing heralded Bay Area prospects Nick Johnson, Brandon Ashley, and Aaron Gordon, among others.

A decent time to be a Bear, honestly. Photo by Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

Martin inherited 6-foot-6 point forward Tyrone Wallace from previous coach Mike Montgomery and shifted him to point guard full-time, where he has become a Pac-12 Player of the Year frontrunner. Jordan Matthews has become Cal's most lethal rainmaker from beyond the arc. Junior Jabari Bird was a 2013 McDonald's All-American from nearby Richmond, California, who's taken a backseat to the freshmen headliners. There's also Ivan Rabb, the top prep center of 2015 and Martin's first great recruiting success.

The second came shortly after. While Martin was acquainting himself with the 6-foot-11 Rabb, Rabb was persuading the Class of 2015's most sought-after wing scorer to join him in Berkeley. Jaylen Brown was a perfect 6-foot-7 facsimile of an 18-year-old Harrison Barnes and was ranked the No. 4 prospect in ESPN's 150 rankings. He also lived across the country, in Atlanta—far from Berkeley, but in the backyard of Shareef Abdur-Rahim, one of the program's legendary figures. Not only did Brown play for Abdur-Rahim's former coach at Wheeler High School but Abdur-Rahim's twin brothers were among his teammates.

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"When I got the job, I reached out to Shareef," Martin said. "Not so much because of Jaylen, but because he was a Cal alum."

Abdur-Rahim spent just one year at Cal, 20 years ago—he got out just before the NCAA came down on former coach Todd Bozeman—but he was instrumental in helping Martin sell Brown on the school. In the end, Martin wound up with Rabb and Brown in a top-five recruiting haul, and set himself up as the Rocky Balboa to a team of talented young Creeds.

Martin still has his work cut out for him. Thus far, the team defense is outside the top 100 in points scored and points allowed per 100 possessions. Wallace leads the team in points and assists, but suffers from bouts of tunnel vision. Brown was a dominant high school slasher, but through 10 games was shooting a woeful 15 percent on two-point jumpers. Rabb is a lightweight in the low post, but has been an effective window-wiper defender and an efficient scorer from the elbows and the paint. The campaign got off to a rough start at the Las Vegas Invitational over Thanksgiving weekend, and Cal dropped from their top 14 perch to the Top 25 waiting list. Nearly a month later, they're still in the Others Receiving Votes scrum.

There's motivation, and then there is attempting to eat Jabari Bird. Photo by John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports

Cal's strengths and weaknesses were both on display in an overtime loss at No. 5 Virginia on Tuesday. The Bears were talented enough to make a ton of trouble for the supremely disciplined Cavaliers, but not quite mature enough to put them away.

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There's still a lot to learn, in other words. "I didn't go into this situation saying, 'Well, these are highly touted guys, teach them differently than you teach the other guys or teach them differently than you treat the other freshmen,'" Martin says. And so the coach has settled down to teach, working to make his collection of talented teenagers something more like a team.

That ulcer-inducing OT loss to Virginia could have a second life as a collective teaching moment. It provided an idea for how far they've come and how much further they have to go. Holding the nation's most efficient offense to 18 percent first half shooting, while Brown perforated Virginia's ironclad defense, is an experience to build on. Their 13 team turnovers to 10 assists, on the other hand, is something to fix.

The nearby Golden State Warriors' spacing and ball movement hasn't spread by osmosis to the Bears. Aided by college basketball's shorter shot clock—"I would've been happy if it had gone down to 25 [seconds]," Martin says—Cal has improved their nightly scoring by 11 points per game, but they have also been stymied by zone defenses due to their limited outside shooting and a bottom-50 turnover margin. Martin's job now is to help some talented players refine their games through on-the-job training.

At 44—the age Newell was riding into the sunset—Martin is, in a way, learning on the job, too. John Calipari and Coach K regularly wrangle rosters stocked with prep All-Americans, but Martin is making his first real foray into the world of one-and-dones.

"Coach K once said, in coaching, players only care about what you've done unless you can show them," Martin says. "They don't really care what you did in the past." Which means, as he tries to turn the clock back 50-odd years, Martin must also win here in the present. It's not an easy job, but Martin isn't a man to bet against. Have you seen his poker face?