by Michael Duca

BERKELEY–The Cal Bears came away this past week with wins over Oregon and Oregon State and averaged 92 points a game, the Bears hosted Washington on Wednesday night and will face Washington State on Saturday night. The Bears Justin Cobbs whose averaging 15 plus points a night was voted player of the week in the NCAA and the way he’s playing he could end up being player of the year.

You hope that people around the league are paying attention to when you don’t jump to another league after your freshman year when you actually decide to get an education in the classroom but also an education on the court. That basketball education really pays off too it’s not that unusual to make adjustments at half time. Teams will come out and scheme on you a little bit that you didn’t see something on film or on the scouting report.

The great coaches understand how to adjust and you can overcome a halftime deficit, you could overcome a situation where your team can see what it expected to see and that’s a lot of what went on and Cal head coach Mike Montgomery challenged Cobbs to be more aggressive in shooting the basketball and he still does what he does distributing the ball and grabbing a few key rebounds.

This is a young man who can also score the ball substantially, Cobbs can go out and get you 20-25 points a game a night, those players are not a dime a dozen, you have to take advantage of their skill sets. Going into the season it was thought that the top three were Oregon, UCLA and Arizona, UCLA has stumbled a bit, Oregon has stumbled a bit losing three straight including to Cal.

Cal seems to be consistently improving as the season goes along which is a hallmark of a Mike Montgomery. There’s a lot of conference basketball to play yet, there’s only three games in the books but if Cal is able to take care of things this week against the two Washington schools coming into Haas Pavilion. If Cal gets into a really solid undefeated conference start then we have to begin considering Cal becoming a third member of that three in the Pac 12 conference.

When they look at the original six rotation that are injured right now one of the teams that are currently playing with a solid eight man rotation it’ll be interesting to see how Montgomery deploys that talent and how’s he’s able to rest guys and respond to different defensive looks that the team sees. There isn’t anybody in the conference whose a better tactical coach than Montgomery.

Montgomery has a full quiver of arrows this year were going to see some more unexpected results out there out of that team just like they did in Oregon. So the Bears can’t go down if they win and as simple as that sounds it’s something to remember as the conference began this season if you keep winning nobody is going to get past you.

Michael Duca covers Cal basketball with Morris Phillips for Sportstalk radio

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