by Paul Teetor
It was a week of much-needed change for the beleaguered USC men’s basketball program. They lost a coach, got a new one, and lost almost all their players – including the most famous one, Bronny James.
On Monday Head Coach Andy Enfield announced that after 11 mostly mediocre years he was leaving to become the head coach at Southern Methodist University, a football school that would like to increase its basketball profile — the same dynamic that greeted Enfield when he was hired at USC a decade ago.
But now Enfield was firing USC before it could fire him.
A year ago, All Ball called for Enfield to be fired after yet another first round loss in the NCAA tournament. We explained why they needed to make this move before they started playing in the Big Ten next year.
From the March 21, 2023 issue of the Easy Reader:
It’s not that he’s a terrible coach. He’s not. He presents well, knows his x’s and o’s, recruits hard and looks like a good sportsman when he’s shaking hands with the coach who just beat him.
In this case, it was Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, a pugnacious, in-your-face kind of guy who tore his white board in half at one point in the second half when his players failed to carry out his instructions.
Which is exactly the kind of thing Enfield would never do – publicly during a game or privately in the locker room. And that’s the problem: just as UCLA has taken on the fiery personality of its hard-boiled Coach Mick Cronin, USC teams have taken on Enfield’s laid-back, too-cool-for-school persona.
The predictable 72-62 loss to Michigan State gave the Trojans and their big-buck boosters a taste of what they’re going to be dealing with on a regular basis when their teams start playing in the Big Ten in 2024.
And the brutal truth is that Enfield’s teams are too soft to win in the NCAA Tournament, and way too soft to win in the Big Ten.
So before the Trojans start playing regularly in the Big Ten in the fall of 2024, they need to absorb the lesson they were taught Friday morning by Michigan State: come out fighting and never let up.
Then, just four days later, after a warp-speed coaching search, USC Athletic Director Jennifer Cohen announced that Arkansas Head coach Eric Musselman had been hired as their new coach.
“This is a transformational day for USC men’s basketball,” Cohen said. “Coach Musselman not only builds elite, high-performing teams, he knows how to sustain them. He has a bold vision and a plan for USC basketball. And it centers around very high expectations and standards for himself, for his players and for his staff.”
Just as importantly, Musselman brings the one element that had been conspicuously lacking under Enfield: passion for the game, excitement for the program, and energy for the players.
In other words, USC now has a match for UCLA’s fiery, passionate, energetic coach Mick Cronin. While Cronin is known for his high decibel sideline demeanor and foot-stomping demands, he has never, as far as All Ball knows, done something like what Musselman did after Arkansas upset top-seeded Kansas in last year’s NCAA tournament.
When the game ended and Arkansas fans stormed the court, Musselman tore off his shirt, swung it around in the air, and danced on the scorer’s table as he embraced his players.
Musselman displayed that same level of passion and commitment when he spoke to the press after being introduced by Cohen at the Galen Center.
“We think the potential here is through the roof,” he said. “We believe that with all the things going on, with the USC brand, with going into the Big Ten, this is really an incredible fit for us as a family, and an incredible fit for USC.”
Musselman, 59, is the son of famed coach Bill Musselman and has been around basketball all his life. He has been the coach of the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings in the NBA and the head coach at Nevada and Arkansas, among other stops in his long hoops journey where he established a reputation as a quick turn-around artist.
USC needs someone like that now because its roster is almost empty. Only three scrubs remain from Enfield’s last team that didn’t even make the NCAA Tournament. Leading scorer Boogie Ellis has exhausted his eligibility, and then the real blow came Friday when Bronny James – LeBron’s son – both declared for the NBA draft and entered the college transfer portal.
His double action screamed one thing: get me out of here, one way or the other.
Because of the NBA’s complicated draft rules, Bronny can declare for the draft and test the waters to see if he is likely to be among the 60 players that are drafted every year. Then, as long as he hasn’t hired an agent, he can return to college and play another year and then try again.
Right now, not a single mock draft has James, who averaged fewer than 5 points this year as a freshman coming off heart surgery, projected in either the first or second round.
While that sounds bad for Bronny, it’s actually good for the James family: it opens the door for the Lakers to draft James in the second round or sign him as an undrafted free agent like they did with Austin Reaves a few years ago – and look how well that turned out. Reaves is now the Lakers third best player behind LeBron and Anthony Davis.
All this would be done to make a reality of LeBron’s oft-stated goal of playing with one or both of his sons before he hangs up his sneakers. Bronny isn’t close to being ready for the NBA – but hey, what LeBron wants LeBron usually gets.
While Bronny has never spoken about a desire to play with his father in the NBA, all the dominoes are falling just right for father and son to play together as soon as next fall.
The family that plays together stays together. So look for LeBron and son to be in a Lakers uniform next season.
Ohtanis’ home run turns into a strikeout
This is not the way Shohei Ohtani’s dream season with the Dodgers was supposed to start.
First came the utter shock of seeing the golden boy swept up in a gambling investigation, as detailed in last week’s All Ball column.
That was bad enough.
But on Thursday night a second black mark was entered against his name in the public ledger when he finally hit his first home run as a Dodgers after 37 at-bats. The lucky fan who caught the ball, Ambar Roman, said that she was pressured by Dodgers security guards to give it to Ohtani in exchange for an autographed ball, a couple of autographed Dodgers caps and an autographed bat.
Meanwhile, experts said the ball is worth somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 on the open market. The thing that made this news so reprehensible was that the working-class owner of the ball said the Dodgers threatened to withhold authentication of the ball unless she took the deal. And that they kept her husband, Alexis Valenzuela, away from her while she was given little time to make her decision.
Without that authentication from the Dodgers the ball could be worthless on the open market. When news broke Saturday of how badly the Dodgers treated her, they scrambled to make it up to her. They said the couple would be invited back for another game and given more authenticated memorabilia.
Someone in the Dodgers marketing department should be fired over this mess.
It shouldn’t fall to the media to have to expose this kind of heavy-handed fan treatment for the Dodgers to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, we are all waiting anxiously for MLB to report the results of its Ohtani gambling investigation. Commissioner Rob Manfred said he expected the preliminary conclusions soon.
For Ohtani’s sake and the Dodger’s sake, I hope his story holds up and that he had nothing to do with gambling or paying off the $4.5 million in debts run up by his interpreter.
Stay tuned.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
