Mick Cronin shares excitement over how UCLA is playing

UCLA just won its eighth basketball game in a row, beating Colorado in Boulder this past weekend to secure a Pac-12 regular season championship with two games to go. Though head coach Mick Cronin is rarely satisfied, even he says he had to take a step back and appreciate how well his team is playing at the moment.

“Yeah, not many people are ranked two or three in every metric in college basketball, so if I’m not happy now, I don’t know when the heck I’m gonna be happy,” Cronin joked in the postgame press conference following his team’s win over the Buffaloes. “And I get banged on for not being happy,” he added.

What does make Mick Cronin happy is the way UCLA handled its business on the road despite shooting poorly from deep.

“You know, it’s nice to do it on the road, I take a lot of pride in who we are on the road. It’s hard to win on the road. If it was – 18 games in, to have a three-game lead with two games to play in a high-major conference, you know, I don’t know if anybody else has that. You know, you got a win when you go 1-for-14 from the 3-point line on the road. So, great resiliency.”

Certainly not an easy spot for the Bruins but they prevailed anyways — and a huge part of that victory was point guard Tyger Campbell.

“Tyger brought us home late,” said Cronin. “We were searching for offense, I put the ball in his hands, he was 0-for-5 at half, so that makes him 5-for-7 in the second half. Yep, it was – look, coaching only goes so far. Coaching’s overrated. Good coaching is you develop your players and then put the ball in the right guy’s hands. We had some good execution down the stretch, in spite of some of our foul trouble. To be able to get Jaime the ball, draw some double teams and get Tyger the ball.”

This UCLA team has so many veterans who can step up and lead the charge on a given night. Against Colorado, that man was Tyger.