He has the uncanny ability to coach toughness into overachieving teams.
He also has the audacity to publicly humiliate them.
He wins games, one Final Four and two Sweet 16 appearances in his first four seasons that had postseasons.
He also loses fans, longtime boosters fed up with his unhinged sideline behavior, his rude postgame rips, and even recent criticism directed toward those fans themselves.
Mick Cronin thinks the Pauley Pavilion crowd should be more publicly supportive of his UCLA players?
Has Mick Cronin looked in a mirror?
It’s what has become an annual UCLA basketball conundrum, the question of how should thousands of John Wooden disciples feel about a man with the opposite demeanor running their basketball team?
Cronin is loved for building teams that improve with the schedule, fight till the finish, and have been a couple of last-second Gonzaga heaves from seriously competing for a national title.
He is also loathed for creating the difficult journey his players must endure to get there, constantly blaming them, publicly scorning them, and instantly benching them.
Be quick but don’t hurry? There exists a different version of pyramid advice for the confoundingly complicated Cronin.
Be strong but don’t bully.
That’s all. That’s it. If only Mick Cronin could somehow find a way to harness his competitive ferocity so the Bruin players and fans don’t always feel the public brunt of his anger, he could forge the sort of long-term UCLA relationship that would make Wooden proud.
But if he can’t — and in his sixth season he shows no sign of changing — then he better keep winning. He better keep summoning his Madness magic. There are noticeably fewer complaints about temper tantrums if they happen in the Sweet 16.
If Cronin fails to make a strong tournament run for a second consecutive season — remember, they didn’t even make the tourney last year — next winter his job situation could begin to get murky. He’s nowhere near a hot seat. But his blame-at-all-costs culture is slowly making the ground beneath him more uncertain.
After Sunday’s victory over Ohio State resulted in the 53-year-old becoming the youngest active coach to reach 500 wins, I asked him about his milestone, and he answered with charming humility.
(Note: He’s always charmingly humble after wins. If only he could show some of that same calm introspection after losses)
“I’ve had some really, really good jobs, and obviously I haven’t scored a point, so it’s really not about me,” he said. “You know, I really don’t think about stuff like that, I never have.”
He then quoted a fellow coach, noting, “Jeff Van Gundy said… ‘Legacy is the most overrated thing in life.’ ,,, So being a good — what I tell these guys — being a good father and a good person, when they lay you down to lower that casket, OK?”
I wondered how this marvelous philosophy fits with his postgame diatribes like the recent one after the Minnesota loss in which he criticized the fans for understandably groaning after missed free throw attempts instead of cheering their support.
At the time he said, “Our crowd, they make it worse…. when a guy misses a free throw…how about help the guy? How about cheer for the guy?”
So Sunday, after fans actually cheered a free throw miss in apparent support of Cronin’s unusual criticism, I asked if that comment had received any blowback. Once again, his answer involved a philosophy that made sense in moderation.
“You’re never gonna make everybody happy. So, yeah, I’m sure I get blowback for a lot of stuff. That’s the way it is, the way it is. I don’t worry about that stuff,’ he said. “I worry about when Skyy (Clark) and Eric (Dailey Jr.) are 28 — not right now — are they gonna say that I cared about ‘em? Enough to be hard on ‘em and try to teach ‘em right from wrong. And sometimes I say stuff I shouldn’t say, I’m well aware of that. I can be too hard on ‘em, OK? But I’d rather err on that side ‘cause I wake up worrying about what they think when they’re 28, not when they’re 18.”
He added, “When they’re 28, what was Mick Cronin all about? Did he let me do things I shouldn’t have been doing just ‘cause I was scoring points for him? Or, did he sit me down and try to change my ways as a man? And to me, that’s way more important than winning 500.”
That’s all wonderful stuff. And for the record, his consistently ripped players play hard for him and publicly support him, including showing up at Sunday’s postgame presser wearing T-shirts adorned with his image in celebration of his 500th win.
Said Clark of Cronin: “Since my first day here until now, I’ve definitely matured probably the most I have in a season. He’s taught us a lot. He’s taught us about how the real world works and he’s definitely tough on us, and you know, there’s some days we walk into practice and he’s just on us the whole day, but if really you sit back and look at it from a different perspective, you can tell he does care about us and that he’s looking out for our best interest.”
Added Dailey Jr. of Cronin: “I feel like coach teaches us a lot of lessons that don’t pertain to basketball, too. A lot of life lessons, a lot of real-life situations…He’s just a real coach, a real person, and that’s really what you need to survive in this real world…he yells, but everything in the world is not going to be nice and pretty. So I think that’s making us tough for the real world.”
His players obviously aren’t going to publicly criticize him, but those two statements seemed real, heartfelt, a perfect example of how Cronin has won 500 games.
When the greatness of its winning tradition matches the strength of its learning culture, UCLA basketball can be so lovely.
So why does Mick Cronin insist on frequently making it so ugly?
Here’s hoping he can modify his behavior to match his coaching prowess. If not, here’s hoping this rebuilding team suddenly starts winning big again.
Absent both transformations, in regards to the UCLA future of Mick Cronin, this time next season we’ll be having an entirely different conversation
The post Plaschke: Mick Cronin can coach, but can he chill? His longterm UCLA future may depend on it appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
