Chad Baker-Mazara’s USC exit stemmed from more

USC’s resolution to dismiss top scorer and three-point shooter Chad Baker-Mazara on the doorstep of the postseason left many questioning Sunday why coach Eric Musselman seemingly would sabotage his staff’s already-tenuous hopes of making the NCAA event.

To Gilbert Arenas, the previous NBA star and podcast host whose son Alijah is a freshman guard with the Trojans, the transfer was significantly baffling. So he took to social media Sunday, sporting Baker-Mazara’s No. 4 USC jersey, to share his frustration.

“Right before the tournament? This is what we’re doing?” Arenas said in the video. “Our best player? Mr. I-Get-Buckets? Every night, he brings it every night. highly likely 18, 20 every night.”

“When you the best player on the team, whatever you say, you right,” he continued.

The transfer to half methods with Baker-Mazara was not based on an remoted incident, a individual acquainted with the choice but not approved to talk about it publicly told The Times, but moderately the fruits of a season’s price of points that boiled over after the second half of Saturday’s home loss to Nebraska.

The Trojans had been trailing by three factors three minutes into the second half when Baker-Mazara took off in transition after Cornhuskers ahead Pryce Sandfort, who was driving for a layup. Baker-Mazara closed the hole and swatted the ball. Then he fell arduous on the hardwood.

Baker-Mazara had missed three video games last month because of a knee sprain and sat out practices throughout the season because of nagging minor accidents. After mendacity still on the court for a few seconds, he acquired up and walked down the tunnel toward the locker room.

Baker-Mazara returned a couple of minutes later with a noticeable limp. He sat down in a courtside seat on the baseline, two chairs down from injured guard Rodney Rice.

The sight of Baker-Mazara sitting away from the remaining of the staff sparked questions after the sport, but it wasn’t that uncommon; he sat there at varied occasions this season. What was odd was how Baker-Mazara dealt with the remaining of the half after he told employees he wasn’t ready to play.

As USC unraveled without him in the second half of an 82-67 loss, Baker-Mazara was principally indifferent from the motion. At one level, he went behind the USC bench and chatted with followers in the first row.

At the end of a season crammed with related such moments, persistence had worn skinny. By the next morning, Baker-Mazara no longer was with the staff. USC didn’t announce the rationale for his departure.

The employees was properly conscious, when it introduced in the senior last spring, that his long historical past in faculty hoops was littered with related troubling moments. USC was Baker-Mazara’s fifth college in six seasons.

“There will never be a dull moment,” Musselman said in May. “Might be that I’ve got a little more on my plate.”

Baker-Mazara spent his freshman season at Duquesne before transferring to San Diego State. He was named Mountain West sixth man of the 12 months as a sophomore but was kicked off the staff by coach Brian Dutcher after he skipped lessons, failed exams, missed assignments and fell so far behind on his teachers that he couldn’t catch up.

Baker-Mazara told the San Diego Union-Tribune last spring that it was “a growing-up moment.” He assured everybody he’d realized his lesson.

Chad Baker-Mazara goes up to dunk under stress from Indiana ahead Sam Alexis at Galen Center on Feb. 3.

(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

“Some people have to go through it in different ways,” Baker-Mazara told the Union-Tribune. “I had to go through it that way. … My parents were both mad. That was weeks of earfuls: ‘Man, what are you doing?’ It was weeks. I had to get my ear chewed off a couple times.”

He ended up at Northwest Florida State, a junior faculty in Niceville, Fla., before signing with Auburn. Dutcher spoke with then-Auburn coach Bruce Pearl on the telephone, according to the Union-Tribune, and told him Baker-Mazara’s points weren’t on the court; he “just needs to get his life in better order, be more organized, be more on time, do all the little things.”

Pearl and Auburn proved to be a good match, though Baker-Mazara earned some ire there too after he was ejected in the second half of a two-point additional time loss to rival Alabama for elbowing a Crimson Tide participant in the back of the top. Pearl later defended him on social media.

Pearl, now a TV analyst, said the guard is “an incredibly talented kid with a real gift” but his “emotions at times have gotten the better of him.”

“He helped us get to the Final Four, we won a league championship with him,” Pearl said on FS1’s “Wake Up Barstool” on Monday. “On a good day, he would’ve been about the 20th-best player taken in the NBA draft last year.

“But we all know that Chad has bad days.”

On good days, Baker-Mazara routinely jolted the Trojans’ offense to life. When Rice went down with a season-ending shoulder injury in November, Baker-Mazara grew to become even more very important and responded, averaging 22 factors during the first seven video games without Rice, and USC completed nonconference play 12-1.

He continued to lead the Trojans with a career-high 18.5 factors per recreation. Against UCLA, he knocked down three consecutive three-pointers to stake the Trojans to an early lead. The earlier Saturday, he scored 13 straight factors in what appeared like a sure win over Oregon. Against Nebraska, Baker-Mazara scored 14 factors in 16 first-half minutes.

But there also had been stretches of the season in which Baker-Mazara’s availability remained a query. He sat out practices forward of Big Ten play and dealt with what was deemed a nagging neck injury, only to show up in the lineup against Michigan and Michigan State. He averaged just 20 minutes across both video games.

By March, amid a five-game dropping streak, Baker-Mazara’s less-productive moments had began to outweigh his contributions in the eyes of USC’s employees. Though, with time working out to save their season, how the Trojans plan to substitute that manufacturing is a query everybody — not just Gilbert Arenas — is asking.