Will Ben Howland Address Issues Concerning UCLA Basketball Assistant Coaches?

and I hope that as time goes on this site will continue to explore the different angles.

One thing to keep in mind is that not every top player is a UCLA player and I’m not just referring to academics. Only certain players will thrive under Ben Howland, only certain players will succeed in his system. Same is true for other coaches as well.

Sure, there are guys like Kevin Love who are so good and whose skills are so universally needed that he could play for anyone. But a lot of guys thrive in certain situations under certain conditions. And you have to find those guys and match up with them.

You know, the recruiting part is sometimes the easy part. I mean, when you start to sell the tradition, the school, the city, the competition, the chance to compete at the highest level — you’re going to get good players or at least desired players (who may or may not pan out). The trick is identifying the right guys, finding them early, establishing the relationships prior to making an offer. You need to build trust, recruit the parents, have a good relationship with the high school coach or the AAU coach.

There is a skill to it. Heck, look no further than our football coach if you want to see someone who knows how to do this.

When I was re-reading this post, I thought of the Russell Westbrook recruitment.

Russell Westbrook was a good, local high school player. He had an offer from Wake Forest. This is nothing to belittle: that’s a good school in a good league and it’s the school that produced Chris Paul. Wake Forest may not be Duke or UNC, but it’s a good offer. And Kerry Keating somehow convinced Russell Westbrook to not commit until it looked like Jordan Farmar was going pro.

This PE story tells a version of it. It doesn’t mention Wake Forest, but that’s a school I remember being after Westbrook.

Here is a relevant passage:

Scholarship offers poured in from the likes of Kent State, Creighton and San Diego the summer before his senior year, but former UCLA assistant coach Kerry Keating cajoled Westbrook into waiting until the late signing period in April to make his decision. UCLA rewarded Westbrook’s patience with a scholarship offer in mid-April, days before guards Jordan Farmar and Arron Afflalo declared for the NBA draft.

“The only reason we needed another guard was because Jordan and Arron were playing well enough at that point to get early looks from the NBA,” Keating said. “I had to do a lot of convincing with Russell because it’s hard to tell a kid to wait for something that isn’t definite when he already has something that is.”

It depends on who those guys, whoever they are, are able to bring in in the next recruiting class. If we can fill the gaps in our lineup with young talent in the mold of a Farmar, Afflalo, Collison, etc, then perhaps there will be patience from the fanbase if there is noticeable improvement on the court. It only took one year for that class to make its impact felt, and two years to jump start the program into elite status. In a way, it’s like wishing for lightning in a bottle, but given what the outlook is right now, Howland is going to need to find some people who can make that happen for him once again or he’s probably going to see the donations dry up.

Not sure how much fun he is having up there.

had two job opportunities at the time he left.

He had the SC job and the Long Beach State job.

SC made a larger financial commitment, not only in terms of salary but also in assistant’s salaries and investment in the program. Some believe that Long Beach was the better opportunity. It’s tough to win at SC and they are up against it in that league.

LBSU is a dormant but potentially strong program. If LBSU recruited well in SoCal — mostly by getting the guys who aren’t UCLA or Pac 10 players — they would have a strong team. When LBSU is goo, the Long Beach community supports them. Jerry Tarkanian, Lute Olson and Seth Greenberg all coached at Long Beach State and went on to have great careers (two of them are Hall of Famers).

I don’t Keating personally — chatted with him once or twice. Not sure why he wanted SC, but money talks for most of us (me included).

I totally agree that he can’t do everything. That’s why I feel that a large part of the roster woes we have — which are contributing to a difficult season — are the fault of our current assistant coaches.

Did Howland hire them? Yep. Is he responsible ultimately? Yep. Does he need to make at least one change on his staff and bring in a recruiting expert? Probably, yes, we’re still debating that here.

In no way was I suggesting that Keating replace Howland. If Howland left after the season to coach the Clippers, I wouldn’t even bring up his name to replace Howland. But there are guys out there who can really recruit and who would love to work at UCLA. Imagine you’re a recruiting assistant and you’re working at some other school that isn’t UNC or Kansas or Kentucky or a school like that. Wouldn’t you rather ply your expertise at UCLA instead of at some smaller, less renowned program?

For the record, west coast recruiting ties would be nice, but they are overrated. If you’re a coach at UCLA, you have west coast ties the second you introduce yourself. We just need one of those guys who lives to recruit, who loves sitting in the high school, gym, who knows how to tweet and text and do Facebook and get to know a kid’s mother and girlfriend and then knows how to sit in a coaches meeting and say “Ben, we need to recruit this kid, he is exactly what we’re looking for.”

Do you want us to point to the exact post where BN advanced an institutional argument that UCLA should fire Howland now?

All we have asserted so far is that Howland should face heat and criticism. There is nothing wrong with that and it is deserved given UCLA is heading towards a losing season, which should never be acceptable at UCLA.