Another big man not going to UCLA. Halaifonua is a 7', 270 lb. center out of Georgetown where he averaged 8ppg, 4rpg, 1 bpg, 1apg in 17.5 mpg. He is relatively mobile and rated #56 by 24/7. I thought he would be a good addition to UCLA to combat the other B1G bigs out there. I can't find anything on the web that would indicate UCLA was involved in any way with his recruitment.
I'm getting the feeling that Cronin isn't interested in bringing in another big man. There's very little information out there about anything that's going on in the transfer portal so it's just a guess. But we keep seeing big after big go somewhere else. Either he's not interested or he just doesn't have the money to even compete with the inflated prices in general for big men.
Truth be told, I'm not too excited at the prospects for next year's team with Booker being the main big on the team. Booker improved significantly over the course of last season, but to my eye he's going to have to improve a lot more to even get to a dependable level as the prime big man, In spite of his improvements he still IMO played too weak and passively.