The UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team looked dead in the water just a few months ago. Mick Cronin hot seat rumors were swirling, and the Bruins had some ugly losses that led them toward the bottom of the Pac-12 Conference.
However, a recent six-game winning streak and the Bruins winning eight of nine before losing a heartbreaker to Utah on Sunday had people thinking differently.
Isaac Trotter of 247Sports wrote on February 12 that UCLA was “shockingly different” than they were at the end of the 2023 calendar year. Here’s some of what Trotter wrote:
UCLA is still quite a bit away from the Big Dance bubble. The Bruins don’t have a single Quad 1 win yet on their ledger. They have four Quad 3 or Quad 4 losses on their resume that are hard to ignore. But this team is shockingly different than what we saw in December and early January…That team who lost eight of nine games between Dec. 9 and Jan. 11 and this current iteration of UCLA basketball feel miles apart.
It’s been quite a turnaround for UCLA, but Joe Lunardi also mentioned their bubble hopes need a lot of help, and a last-second loss to Utah didn’t help that case.
Still, UCLA has turned it around, somehow, and they still have five games left, two coming against ranked teams (Washington State and Arizona).