Kentucky basketball mailbag: Who sits when Terrence Clarke returns to UK’s lineup?
The first two installments of this week’s Kentucky basketball mailbag featured questions about John Calipari’s future with the Wildcats and the team’s recruiting outlook for next season.
This is the third and final installment, which includes questions on Terrence Clarke’s return from injury and other issues relating to this UK team and the direction of the program, in general.
My question that I’ve not heard asked of Cal to this point is this: Whose minutes is Clarke going to take when he comes back?
That’s a good question, and you’re not going to get a straight answer out of Calipari on it. Partly because he doesn’t give straight answers to questions like this, and partly because he probably has no idea at this point.
A big part of the problem with this UK team — one that Calipari acknowledged after Wednesday night’s loss at Georgia — is you never know who’s going to be good and who’s going to be bad from game to game. One night, Player X could be the Cats’ top performer. The next game, he could be their worst. Who is UK’s best player this season? It’s not an easy question to answer, and — whatever player you name — you can probably find a handful of games where he was one of the Cats’ most ineffective performers.
The reader who asked this question added that his guess would be that Clarke will take Dontaie Allen’s minutes. Maybe, to a degree. Allen’s emergence as a key player on this team coincided exactly with Clarke’s injury, and he’s been an important rotation player ever since. If Clarke had never been injured, perhaps Allen would have never gotten a chance.
Let’s look a little deeper into the numbers — and the way players are being used — before relegating Allen back to the bench.
Clarke, who is still nursing an ankle injury with no set return date — Calipari said Monday night he’d probably be out another 7-10 days — has sat out the past six games. Here’s the backcourt playing time breakdown over those six games:
▪ Devin Askew has played 192 minutes, playing at least 30 minutes in five of the six games that Clarke has sat out. Against Vanderbilt, he played 23 minutes after picking up two fouls in the first three minutes of the game and a third foul just 34 seconds after halftime.
▪ Davion Mintz has played 191 minutes, playing at least 30 minutes in four of the six games that Clarke has been sidelined.
▪ Brandon Boston has played 172 minutes, with his playing time pretty equally distributed among the six games — no more than 33, no less than 26 since Clarke has been out.
▪ Dontaie Allen has played 156 minutes. After playing 32 minutes in each of his first two games in the rotation, he’s played 22, 24, 23 and 23 minutes over the past four games. Pretty consistent.
Another wrinkle: Keion Brooks is back for UK and has averaged 22.5 minutes over the last four games. He and Clarke have still never played together. So Brooks’ playing time will need to be factored in, to some degree, as well.
In the five games he was fully healthy, Clarke played more than 30 minutes in every one and at least 35 minutes in four. But surely he won’t be playing that much when he returns, at least at the beginning.
So, where do the minutes come from?
You have to think that Calipari doesn’t want Askew and Mintz playing as much as they’ve been forced to play these past few games. The UK coach had already moved Clarke into more of a primary ball handler role — the role Askew and Mintz often play now — before his injury. It wasn’t going well. But it was also a small sample size. And UK still needs help in that area. With Askew and Mintz averaging 32ish minutes per game in Clarke’s absence, surely their playing time comes down when he returns. Take eight or so minutes away from each of them — which might actually help them, individually — and you can still keep Allen on the floor for 20ish minutes per game and have 20ish minutes available for Clarke. That’s a start. (We’re assuming Boston’s minutes stay basically the same).
If Clarke can come back and play at full health, he’ll play more than 20 minutes a game, and it should be expected that Calipari will continue to tinker with lineup combinations, especially with Brooks back on the court. Nothing much is working at the moment, so the experimentation is bound to continue.
Obviously, Calipari wants to win games right now, but, at this point, winning the conference tournament might be the only realistic path to the NCAA Tournament. Calipari has always tinkered with lineups in the past — it’s just taking longer now, due to a truncated preseason and overall inconsistency — to see what works best by the end of the season. And, by the end of the season, the right guys are playing. When Clarke returns, and in the games that follow, don’t be surprised if Calipari shortens his lineup some as a few of these backcourt players emerge. If they ever do.
“Does the cream rise here?” Calipari asked rhetorically this week. “And that’s what’s going to happen now. Some guys will step up, some guys will take a step back. It’s not different.”
Not different. It’s just taking a lot longer to figure out than it has in the past.
Is the MO this year to get Brandon Boston to play better or make the tourney? If allegiance is “to the players,” is there a conflict of interest?
This question came in before Wednesday night, when Boston was relegated to the bench for the first time this season and Dontaie Allen started in his place. Wednesday was also perhaps Boston’s best game as a Wildcat. Yet another head-scratcher in this frustrating-to-figure-out season.
The answer to your question is … both. It seems clear that John Calipari truly believes a major key to unlocking the potential of this team — and, thus, making it to the NCAA Tournament — begins with unlocking the potential in Boston.
In other words, this Kentucky isn’t going anywhere unless the coaches can get Boston going first.
We’ve seen glimpses of it. For much of Wednesday night, he was the best player in blue. And there have been other flashes along the way.
Those of us who watched him quite a bit in high school know what Boston is capable of when he’s on his game. There’s a reason he was considered a top-five national recruit and projected as a top-three NBA Draft pick before this season began.
We also saw plenty of what he can do wrong when he dribbles into trouble, loses focus on defense and just generally tries to force the issue on the court. And that’s the version of Boston that Kentucky fans have mostly seen so far.
Early reports out of UK’s practices were glowing. The coaches who recruited him and now see him every day know there’s much more to his game than he’s showing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Figuring out how to bring that out of him during actual games has clearly been a challenge, but he’s still playing as many minutes as he is because Calipari needs him to figure it out for this team to go anywhere.
The UK coach’s handling of this situation could have been better. Like with other subjects this season, his comments have often been dismissive. And the “not trying to take anyone’s heart away” bit after the Auburn game — after Boston again played poorly and Allen was relegated to the bench for much of the second half after being the team’s top scorer before halftime — was far from the ideal way to explain where he’s coming from.
Going by Calipari’s own comments this season, it’s perfectly reasonable for fans to conclude that there’s a double standard for the situations that have dictated the playing time and overall opportunities for players like Boston and Allen, but there’s more to it than that.
Calipari has given Boston more leeway because he knows (or thinks, at least) there’s much more there, and he needs to find a way to bring it out before the postseason begins. The game Wednesday night was one small step in the right direction on that path, but time is quickly running out.
Do you think everything that happened with Kahlil Whitney last year — lack of playing time and eventually leaving the program — is affecting the way that Calipari is handling the situation with BJ Boston right now?
This is a really interesting question. This one was also sent in before Calipari started Boston on the bench Wednesday night, but it’s still relevant. There were plenty of UK fans wondering why he hadn’t done it much sooner.
You do have to wonder if losing a McDonald’s All-American recruit in the manner that Calipari lost Whitney last season has any bearing on how a coach might treat similar players moving forward, even on some subconscious level.
There were different circumstances around last year’s situation, however — more outside voices directing Whitney’s decision-making, for instance — and I think that has much more to do with it than any kind of hesitance to take minutes away on Calipari’s end.
One of the biggest differences was the construction of the two rosters.
As illustrated earlier, it sure seems like Calipari thinks he needs Boston to be great (or, at least, pretty good) for this team to consistently win games. That wasn’t the case with Whitney last season.
On this team, if Boston doesn’t step up, who will? Dontaie Allen has shown flashes, but he’s scored in single digits the past four games and put up just three shots in 23 minutes Wednesday night. And everyone else has also been highly inconsistent, to put it kindly, from an offensive perspective.
On last season’s team, the emergence of Immanuel Quickley made things much easier on Calipari, who already had Ashton Hagans and Tyrese Maxey penned in as starting guards. Quickley earning his spot — and becoming UK’s best player — forced Calipari to go to the three-point guard lineup, and that, in effect, took minutes away from Whitney.
With Nick Richards also emerging as a big man that Calipari couldn’t afford to take off the court, it left a crowd to compete for the team’s remaining minutes. EJ Montgomery, Keion Brooks and Nate Sestina were all in that group. So was Whitney, who hadn’t shown much reason to give him an extended run and — with UK’s winning identity now as a three-guard-plus-Richards group — became something of an afterthought when it came to keys to Kentucky’s team success.
Quite simply, Calipari knew he could win — and UK did win — with Whitney playing limited minutes. He could afford to sit him, so he did. This time around, it doesn’t look like Calipari has any alternatives than to hope Boston finds his way.
Is it OK that I’ve not watched a full UK basketball game this year, and that I expect that I won’t get around to it because the team is so bad that I don’t want to waste my time? Am I considered a fair-weather fan now?
If you’re now considered a fair-weather fan, you’re not alone.
You’d be surprised — or maybe you wouldn’t — at how many emails, tweets, text messages and conversations in recent years have been along these lines: longtime, diehard Kentucky basketball fans who once thought it was a sin to miss even a minute of a UK game but are now perfectly OK with the idea of missing complete games or even several games at a time.
Obviously, there are a lot more options available to anyone who sits down in front of a TV in 2021, as opposed to five or 10 or 20 years ago. More sports channels, more cable channels, in general, more streaming options for all kinds of content. That probably has something to do with the waning interest.
The bigger issue seems to be folks who are simply turned off by the product on the court.
1. Fans have been saying for years that, “We don’t know these players,” and it’s certainly true that the constant roster turnover under Calipari is a complete 180 from the continuity of the Kentucky basketball program up until he arrived. Players, even stars, used to stay four years. Now you’re lucky to watch them for two. “One-and-done” hadn’t touched Kentucky basketball before the Calipari era. Now it’s the norm, even the stated objective. As soon as fans get to know a guy, he’s off to the NBA (or Australia or Estonia or somewhere else). The four-year favorites that fans get to watch grow — and there have been relatively recent ones, like Tayshuan Prince, Keith Bogans, Chuck Hayes and Darius Miller — are seemingly a thing of the past, never to return. Even though the most recent player on that list last played for UK nine years ago, many fans are still struggling to come to grips with this new era, a trend everywhere, but nowhere more so than Kentucky.
2. The basketball in November and December has been, for the most part, bad. Hard to watch, especially when other forms of entertainment are so readily available. It’s getting more and more difficult to get even the diehards to tune in for some of these non-conference games. And once you lose them for the matchups with Utah Valley and Mount St. Mary’s — and once they find other things to do in that spare time — you might not get them back once SEC play rolls around. (Especially when the basketball, often, isn’t much easier to watch then).
That Wisconsin game six years ago might have been something of a turning point in all this. What was supposed to be a coronation — a 40-0 cap to a magical season — ended in unimaginable fashion, one victory shy of a matchup with Duke for a national championship.
Five days later, seven UK players announced they were leaving school early for the NBA. Seven!
I’ve heard many UK fans say that Wisconsin loss was more heartbreaking than the defeat at the hands of Christian Laettner and Duke in 1992. Maybe because in 1992, you knew the program was moving forward — plenty to celebrate but even better things ahead. After the 2015 stunner, fans were left looking into the unknown. What’s next? Who’s next? Who are these new guys? Will UK ever be this good again? The Cats haven’t been back to the Final Four since.
That Wisconsin loss left UK fans dazed, and Nov. 6, 2018, left many of them defeated.
That’s when Kentucky — ranked No. 2 nationally with another ballyhooed recruiting class — met No. 4 Duke, featuring former UK recruiting targets Zion Williamson, RJ Barrett and Cam Reddish, to start what was supposed to be a potential national championship season.
Duke, of course, won. By a lot. 34 points, in fact, and the game wasn’t even as close as the final margin. Looking around the arena that night, UK fans wore utter shock on their faces. Some of those fans — fans diehard enough to drive to Indianapolis for a nearly 10 p.m. tip on a weeknight, mind you — told me later on that they didn’t watch another Kentucky game for weeks.
That UK team ultimately came within an overtime loss of making the Final Four, but the Duke defeat lingers, in some ways, more than two years later. It was a perfect example that a.) early season games don’t mean much — something Calipari basically says every year — and b.) Kentucky simply hasn’t been getting the type of transcendent recruits that the Cats landed early in the Calipari era.
Maybe tuning out in times like these makes you a fair-weather fan, but it seems to be a big club. And until Kentucky players start sticking around in bigger numbers or UK lands a truly amazing, must-see talent — the next John Wall or Anthony Davis or Zion Williamson — that club is likely to keep growing.
