The latest Sports Illustrated has their top ten for next year. UCLA is ninth. Illinois is tenth. I think those are extremely optimistic projections for both. I'd be thrilled with top 15 for UCLA and top 25 for Illinois. It's hard to project young teams, though, and UCLA will start probably four players who are freshmen/sophomors, while Illinois will start a sophomore and two juniors who have never started and never played big minutes. You just never know what kind of improvements you're going to see in the off-season.

BTW, if it seems like I bring up Illinois a lot, it's because I grew up in Pasadena as a huge Bruins fan (went to UCR), and went to Illinois for law school.
 

The notion that there are only eight teams in the country who will be better than us is a little ridiculous. The main problem that I can see is that we could have "unbalanced" development (for lack of a better term). That is, while our perimeter players are on their way to becoming excellent players, I don't see the same happening for any of our inside players. Even if our outside players experience huge improvements in their game, they can only take us so far without contributions from our big men. The Illini serve as a good example: obviously the most talented players were the "big 3" on the outside, but Powell and Augustine knew their role and provided enough for the team to be successful. I don't know who will do the same for the Bruins. If one out of Fey/Hollins/Mata/Wright/Aboya can step things up significantly next year, then perhaps we can be a top ten team. But at this point, I certainly wouldn't expect it to happen.