Forward plans to leave UCLA

Even though the deadline to declare for the NBA Draft has come and gone, the UCLA men’s basketball team saw one more departure on Wednesday.

Coach Ben Howland announced in a press release that freshman forward/guard Chace Stanback will not return to the team next season and plans to transfer at the end of the year to continue his college basketball career at another school.

Stanback will finish out the spring quarter at UCLA and has not yet decided where he will transfer.

“After speaking with my family and thinking about it for a long time, I feel that it is in my best interest to explore other opportunities,” Stanback said in the official release. “I want to thank my coaches and teammates, because they have helped me improve as a player and grow as a man, and I am thankful to them for that.

“I have a lot of great memories and really enjoyed my time here at UCLA.”

Stanback played at Los Angeles’ Fairfax High School, where his team twice won state championships. In his senior year, he was named the 2007 California Division I Player of the Year.

But Stanback saw little playing time in his freshman season at UCLA, appearing in only 25 of the Bruins’ 39 games, and most of his 144 minutes played came in garbage time at the end of blowouts.

All told, Stanback averaged 1.0 points and 0.7 rebounds per game.

Still, Howland credited the contributions Stanback made to the team’s accomplishments this season.

“Chace is an outstanding young man, and we appreciate what he did for this program this past year,” Howland said in the press release.

“He helped us win a Pac-10 Championship and get to the Final Four, and we will always be appreciative of his efforts. We are supportive of him and his future, in whatever direction he decides to go.”

Stanback will become the second UCLA men’s basketball player to transfer in as many years. Ryan Wright transferred to Oklahoma at the end of last year, his second in Westwood, and sat out this past season in compliance with NCAA transfer rules.

By rule, barring extenuating circumstance, players that transfer from one Division I school to another are required to sit out a year before they can appear in games with their new teams.