News broke today that UCLA basketball assistant coach and the program’s top recruiter David Grace has been fired. What on earth is head coach Steve Alford thinking?
In another head-scratching twist that is the soap opera of UCLA basketball, it has been reported that head coach Steve Alford is letting go of his top assistant and the program’s best recruiter, David Grace.
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Now if you read that last sentence and thought to yourself, “wait, Steve Alford did what?”, you are not alone.
Alford is not exactly a fan favorite at the moment after finishing the 2017-18 season 21-12, finishing in 4th place in the Pac-12 and lost in the NCAA Tournament “play-in”. It gets worse when you look at the big picture of his tenure at UCLA.
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Though I would like to get into all the damning stats once again, I will simply leave you with the fact that Alford has a win percentage of 67.2, has not won any hardware in five years except a Pac-12 Tournament Championship in his first year and yet, has consistently pulled in Top 10 recruiting classes.
The thing about the last statement is that most of the recruiting has been spearheaded by Grace, who has now been relieved of his duties.
What is going on in Westwood?
Alford is not exactly in Bruins’ fan’s good graces (forgive the pun). With an overall underwhelming performance as the head of the program the last five years, Alford has done very little to retain UCLA’s status as an elite Division I program. The only thing that he really had to hang onto was recruiting and now that Grace is gone, so might the Top 25 classes.
Grace had been the main Bruin coach to bring in top recruits, especially those originating from the Compton Magic, an elite level AAU basketball organization and one of the strongest pipelines to UCLA. But that could be gone now and Alford has to find a way to keep recruiting in tact.
The other thing that causes one to raise an eyebrow is how it all apparently went down.
Spoke with David Grace. He said he was notified shortly before the Final Four that he would not be retained despite his massive recruiting success over his five years as a UCLA assistant: "To contribute the way I did and feel like this was happening just blows my mind."
— Ben Bolch (@latbbolch) April 14, 2018
David Grace on what Steve Alford told him about not being retained at UCLA: "He said that Dan [Guerrero] wanted to make the change and the next day I talked to Dan and Dan said he never told him to make a coaching change, so I don’t know where that came from."
— Ben Bolch (@latbbolch) April 14, 2018
So not only has Grace been relieved of his duties for a few weeks, Alford, the head of the UCLA basketball program which was built on the tenets of teamwork and selflessness by John Wooden, allegedly lied to Grace about why he was being let go.
Bruin Report Online went further into it, stating, “A source told us that the move was made because of the friction between Alford and Grace, and that Alford felt he needed to make a change after a disappointing season.”
So to simplify this, Alford let Grace go because they were not seeing eye-to-eye and in the process let his biggest tool in regards to recruiting (the only thing that has apparently saved his job) just walk away. Steve Alford, what are you thinking?
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With so much controversy surrounding Alford, letting a fan-favorite coach go is not the way to try and win back a fanbase that has simply had enough of the mediocrity put out on the court every season. I’m not sure what Alford is trying to do here, but like most things he does, it makes no sense.