College basketball

Pac-10 not packing it in

Chris Dufresne / Los Angeles Times

"Others receiving votes" in Thursday's release of the preseason Associated Press basketball poll ... UCLA.

Program currently under NCAA investigation ... USC.

Program currently under reconstruction ... Arizona.

Number of the top 15 players in the Pacific 10 Conference last season who are returning ... four.

Team picked to win the conference this season ... California.

Last time Cal last won it ... 1960.

Reasons to believe this will be a banner season for the Pac-10 ... can you think of many?

This is going to be different because different is what happens when you fast-forward 27 players to the NBA draft in three seasons.

Hard as you recruit, try as you might, there comes a point when the ledger doesn't balance in shipping and receiving.

"It's going to be good league," former UCLA All-America Marques Johnson said Thursday at Pac-10 basketball media day. "It's not going to be a great league."

Just when we were getting used to great.

Two years ago we had O.J. Mayo versus Kevin Love in the battle for Los Angeles and the Pac-10 standing among the nation's elite leagues. UCLA went to three straight Final Fours and, for the last three seasons, the conference qualified six teams to the NCAA tournament.

The coaches can still coach, the players can still play, but there are issues:

• Someone call the poll police, something's gone awry. UCLA starts the season unranked in either of the leading polling indexes.

"If Duke and North Carolina were not in the top 25, you'd think the (Atlantic Coast Conference) was down," Washington coach Lorenzo Romar said.

• USC, a team that came a breakaway layup from halting Michigan State's run to last year's title game, has since broken apart. Former coach Tim Floyd fled town to God knows where, the NCAA has questions, and the star names have been ripped from the Galen Center marquee.

USC was picked ninth by the media, ahead of only Stanford.

• Arizona finally has a permanent replacement for legend Lute Olson. His name is Sean Miller, he came from Xavier, and he's a superstar. He caught a timing break when USC imploded because a couple of star recruits who were headed for L.A. -- Derrick Williams and Lamont "Momo" Jones -- now are in Tucson.

Miller, though, starts basically from scratch, with five freshmen and four sophomores on scholarship. The school's streak of 25 straight NCAA appearances appears in jeopardy.

"We've never been more vulnerable," Miller conceded. "Can that streak end this year under my watch? Absolutely."

The hard question: Is Arizona a basketball school with bounce-back tradition or was it Lute Olson's singular creation?

It's difficult to deny the league's power drain:

UCLA: Jrue Holiday, Darren Collison, Alfred Aboya, Josh Shipp.

USC: Taj Gibson, Daniel Hackett, DeMar DeRozan.

Arizona: Chase Budinger, Jordan Hill.

Arizona State: James Harden, Jeff Pendergraph

Washington: Jon Brockman, Justin Dentmon.

Washington State: Taylor Rochestie.

Coaches talk about the transition game all the time, and now the entire league is in one.

It's not going to be a YMCA pick-up league, far from it, but it's up to the next wave to build a bridge to the 2012 NBA draft.

But mark this down: there will be stars.

"We just don't know who they are yet," Johnson said.