As the month of October ends and the month of November approaches, the college basketball season will be tipping off soon. Plenty of teams in Division I of the NCAA shall seek to compete for a newly extended amount of spots in the March Madness tournament, which extended from 68 teams to 76. With the additional bids available, there will be more high-stakes games throughout the nation and an expanded bubble of teams looking to sneak into one of the “play-in” games. One of the most decorated programs in the entire country will seek to have their luck turn around after a couple of tough exits in the Round of 32.
That program is the UCLA Bruins, who are seeking their first national title since 1995. Under head coach Mick Cronin, the Bruins have had plenty of rosters that have been good enough to make the tournament, but none that have been able to go the distance and win the whole thing. However, there is a new roster in Westwood this season that is made up of incoming freshmen, transfers from other schools and returning stars that will take on a leading role. With plenty of high-stakes games on their schedule and competing in their third season in the Big Ten Conference, the 22nd-ranked team in the preseason AP Top 25 poll for college basketball shall look to make strides in gaining more wins and making a deep run into the tournament with a group of worthy players that are a unique blend of American and overseas products. So, let’s take a deeper look at the UCLA men’s basketball roster, the most notable games on their schedule and their seed projection for the NCAA tournament happening in four months.
The Roster of the Bruins Features Returning Stars & New Faces, Including a Young Star Forward From Serbia with a High Ceiling of Potential in His Nascent Career
The roster for this 2026-27 Bruins team contains some returning players such as junior guard Trent Perry, senior forward Eric Dailey Jr, and senior forward Xavier Booker. With eligibility departures from Donovan Dent, Tyler Bilodeau and Skyy Clark, some new faces had to be brought in to fill up the roster. The transfer portal was once again active with new players coming to Westwood to compete under Cronin. The most notable newcomer is guard Jaylen Petty, who transferred from Texas Tech after playing there last season. Petty averaged 10 points per game, four rebounds per game, and shot over 40 percent from the field in his freshman season for a Red Raiders team that was eliminated in the Round of 32 in the NCAA tournament against Alabama. Petty fills the role left by Dent, who opted not to return for a fifth season amid the contentious negotiations between student-athletes whose freshman year was in the 2022-23 school year and the NCAA’s new five-for-five rule that prohibits a fifth season awarded to athletes who were seniors in the 2025-26 school year. Petty is expected to be a starting guard alongside Perry, who averaged 12.6 points and three rebounds/assists per game in his Sophomore season. Perry is expected to continue surpassing those numbers as he and Dailey will need to take on a more commanding role with the departure of the two other leading scorers from last season.
Other notable transfers include Filip Jovic from Auburn as a sophomore center from Bosnia & Herzegovina, junior forward Sergej Macura from Mississippi State(he was born in Slovenia), and sophomore center Azavier Robinson from Butler University. Those three players had meager averages in scoring but they are expected to make up the bench scoring from the Bruins. Meanwhile, there are a few freshmen on the team and one of them could be one of the most interesting players in the entire country. His name is Nikola Kustarica and he is a 17-year old Serbian basketball gem with professional experience in a few European basketball leagues. Kustarica(pronounced koo-ster-EET-zah) is a 6’9″ forward with a slender build and he has won MVP honors in the EuroLeague and in the FIBA U17 tournament. Playing for the Barcelona basketball team, Kustarica averaged a high amount of points and his presence will give the Bruins a prized advantage on the boards as well. With two years of eligibility minimum to be served by the youngest recruit in the country this season, UCLA will have multiple seasons of Kustarica to benefit from before he becomes eligible for the NBA draft. Expected to be a potential starter at forward, Kustarica has already provided some flair in an exhibition game against Cal Baptist that occurred on Wed, Oct 21. Kustarica scored 10 points, grabbed eight rebounds and added six assists, five steals and two blocks as well. With his five-star abilities, Kustarica will be one of the most interesting players to watch this season and he has already been placed on the early watchlists of awards such as the Naismith and Julius Erving Awards.
The other main recruits from freshmen signings include forward Joe Philon III from Tampa(who Cronin called the “steal of the recruiting class” and he had a 13 point, 7 rebound performance in the Cal Baptist exhibition game), forward Gunars Grivalds from Latvia(he is the fourth European born player on this Bruins roster), and 6-9 center Javonte Floyd from Atlanta. There will be plenty of rotation options for Cronin and his coaching staff to choose from, but the expected starting five at the beginning of the season will most likely be as follows: guards Jaylen Petty and Trent Perry, forwards Eric Dailey Jr and Nikola Kustarica and center Xavier Booker. Some alterations and changes can be made as necessary, but this UCLA roster is set to compete in this 2026-27 season. Now let us look at some of the most significant games on the Bruins’ schedule from both the non-conference and conference ends.
Bruins’ Schedule Features Non-Conference Neutral Site Games vs. Arizona, Gonzaga & St. Mary’s, Big Ten Slate Featuring Games vs. Ranked Opponents Such as Michigan, USC & Illinois
The Bruins’ schedule for the 2026-27 men’s college basketball season will begin with a game in Las Vegas for the Hall of Fame Series against the Arizona Wildcats, who are the fifth-ranked team in the country. Arizona went to the Final Four last season under head coach Tommy Lloyd and were defeated by the eventual national champion Michigan Wolverines in the National Semifinal game in Indianapolis. The game against the old PAC-12 rival will be the third matchup that UCLA will have at a neutral site location in as many seasons against the Wildcats, who beat the Bruins at the Intuit Dome last November while the boys in blue won in Phoenix against U of A in Dec 2024. The Wildcats still have plenty of good players such as senior center Montiejus Krivas and brought in a big hoard of transfers.
After five consecutive home games against non-conference opponents, the Bruins will compete in the Rady Children’s Invitational occurring on Thanksgiving Day in San Diego. They will play against the Saint Mary’s Gaels, who are a good program out of the West Coast Conference. After that neutral site game down the road, UCLA will play its first conference game in the Big Ten against the Oregon Ducks, who are without their all-time winningest coach in Dana Altman after he stepped down in September. Following the Oregon game at Pauley Pavilion, the Bruins shall play another neutral site game against a fierce rival in the Gonzaga Bulldogs, whom the Bruins have played against for plenty of recent seasons in neutral-site locations. With two matchups in the NCAA tournament in this decade both being won by the Zags(whom the Bruins have split the last two matchups against), UCLA shall play against them at the Honda Center in Anaheim on Sat, Dec 5. The 15th-ranked Gonzaga program is competing in its first season in the resurrected PAC-12, making the matchup against the former conference member Bruins a little awkward.
After concluding 2026 with a game against San Diego State in Westwood, UCLA will play conference games exclusively for the next two months. Their schedule in terms of traveling on the road is similar to their first season in the Big Ten, with road games against Maryland, Rutgers, Nebraska and Indiana in January. The four home opponents in the first month of 2027 for the Bruins will be the sixth-ranked Michigan State Spartans(in the preseason AP poll), Washington Huskies(whom the Bruins will face on the road in December), the Wisconsin Badgers and Michigan(which is a completely different program after losing a lot of its key players and its former head coach to the NBA). The February schedule will open against Illinois on Feb 2 on the road. The Fighting Illini are currently the third-ranked team in the nation in the preseason poll under head coach Brad Underwood and the Bruins won a thrilling game where they came back from down 20+ points and won on a Donovan Dent layup in overtime. UCLA will be mostly staying in its own territory other than road games against Purdue, Northwestern and Oregon. Home games against Iowa, Minnesota, and Ohio State will be accompanied by both games against the USC Trojans, who are the 21st-ranked team in the nation in the preseason poll.
This schedule won’t be easy for this new squad of Bruins, who will look to defend their home court well and get some surprising road wins as well. A potential trip to the NCAA tournament could occur, but improving the seed line will be important if they can get some much-needed wins against ranked opponents.
Preseason Projected Seeding of UCLA in NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Which They Have Not Won in 30+ Years
The Bruins’ chances of making a championship run in recent years have been moderate in the past few years. Under Cronin, the program has appeared in five tournaments over the past six years and they made it to the Final Four in 2021. UCLA was eliminated in the Sweet 16 in 2022 and 2023 and then they missed the tournament entirely in the 2024 season. The Bruins were the seven seed in two different regional brackets over the past two tournaments and they were defeated in the Round of 32 against two seeds in Tennessee and the UConn Huskies respectively.
In the current ESPN Bracketology projections created by Joe Lunardi, the Bruins are slated to be the six seed in the West Region, where the Semifinal and Final matchups are slated to occur at Crypto.com Arena on Mar 25 and 27. UCLA would face the winner of a play-in game between the Oklahoma Sooners and West Virginia Mountaineers and the three seed are the Texas Longhorns, who are a respectable program in the SEC. Other teams that the Bruins would be grouped in with include Arizona(1 seed), Gonzaga(2 seed), Louisville(4 seed), Arkansas(5 seed) and USC(8 seed). For now these are just projections that can change with the occurrence of the season, which is expected to be a unique one in this wild world of college basketball.
Leave a Reply