This Kentucky basketball team is going to force John Calipari into some tough decisions
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Champions Classic preview: No. 4 Kentucky vs. Michigan State
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When everyone is healthy, this Kentucky basketball team goes to 11.
How will John Calipari dial it down to eight?
That’ll be a dilemma for the UK head coach as his 14th season in charge of the Wildcats progresses. It’s one he has already acknowledging. And it’s a question with few easy answers.
“I mean, they’re all good problems,” Calipari said after the season opener against Howard last week. “That’s my job to figure this out and make sure everybody’s, you know, we’re together. We’re cheering for each other.
“I think part of the reason we’re playing well is I’m playing eight guys. Nice little rotation. And you’re getting in there and you can make a mistake and you stay. So the ideal rotation would be eight. But we have 11.”
They will soon enough, at least.
Kentucky played that Howard game without Oscar Tshiebwe, Sahvir Wheeler and Daimion Collins, and the eight healthy scholarship players all received ample opportunity. Freshman Adou Thiero played 13 minutes. Everyone else on the team played at least 19 minutes.
Four days later, Wheeler made his return in a 77-52 victory over Duquesne, and Calipari went with eight players once again. Thiero, who was impressive in the preseason and available for that Duquesne game, didn’t play at all. Freshman center Ugonna Onyenso played 18 minutes and 57 seconds, fewest of the eight guys who got in.
Calipari ran down the box score in his postgame press conference, commenting on which players could’ve played more minutes, which players maybe should have played fewer, reiterating that there will be some tough calls as this season moves along and everyone gets back on the court.
“When you have a deep team, it holds you accountable,” he said Friday night. “Now, it doesn’t mean this is for the rest of the season. Get yourself right, and let’s go. Next game. Move on.”
By the next game — Tuesday night against Michigan State in the Champions Classic — the Cats could have all 11 scholarship players available. Collins rejoined the team for good over the weekend after several days away from the program following the death of his father two weeks ago. Tshiebwe, the reigning national player of the year, will make his season debut soon — possibly this week — after missing the team’s first two games due to a preseason knee procedure.
Their returns will make the Wildcats better, but it won’t necessarily make Calipari’s job easier.
How do you get from 11 to eight? CJ Fredrick — second on the team in points scored and minutes played through two games — grinned at the question last week.
“Yeah. I mean, luckily I’m not the coach right now,” he said, clearly happy it’s not his problem.
Who plays, who sits?
Only two games have been played, but Calipari has already offered up a few hints on how his final rotation might go.
One point he hammered home Friday night: “We got four really good guards.”
That would be Wheeler, Fredrick, Antonio Reeves and Cason Wallace.
Calipari said those players would each play between 20 and 30ish minutes per game this season. Fredrick played a team-high 30 on Friday, with the other three getting 27 each. (And Wheeler was supposed to be on a minutes count, though he was playing too well to stick to it).
Erring on the side of probability, let’s say those four guards average about 27.5 minutes per game. That would be 110 of the team’s 200 available minutes.
Tshiebwe is obviously going to play when he returns. Last season, he averaged 31.9 minutes per game. Is it possible that Calipari could limit his time — especially coming off an October knee injury that could, theoretically, linger — this season?
The UK coach smiled and shook his head before that question was even finished. “No,” he said, though there was a “but” involved.
“He can’t play 36 minutes,” Calipari said.
Tshiebwe played at least 36 minutes in 10 games after league play began last season. He played at least 34 minutes in seven of UK’s last eight games. (The outlier was a 24-minute game against Tennessee in the SEC Tournament, a day riddled with foul trouble). Tshiebwe played 43 minutes in UK’s season-ending loss to Saint Peter’s.
He performed admirably despite all that wear and tear — and it must be a difficult decision to take college basketball’s best player out of the game at any point — but keeping him around 30 minutes is likely an optimal approach.
“You start getting diminishing returns when you start overplaying,” UK associate coach Orlando Antigua told the Herald-Leader in the preseason, noting that this team — with Collins, Jacob Toppin, Lance Ware and Ugonna Onyenso — should be much more able to give Tshiebwe a rest than last season’s squad.
But, he’s likely going to play 30 minutes per game, and that leaves just 10 at the “5” spot. Onyenso has impressed early, and Ware brings lots of energy, but there’s been no indication yet that having two of those players on the court at the same time is an ideal lineup for Kentucky.
That would indicate that — when Tshiebwe returns — Onyenso and Ware will be battling over those extra 10 minutes, with some of that time possibly going to Collins and/or Toppin.
Add the 40 minutes at the “5” spot to the 110 doled out to the four guards, and only 50 minutes of playing time remain. And Calipari still has Collins, Toppin, McDonald’s All-American recruit Chris Livingston and Thiero to worry about.
Thiero’s situation is probably the easiest to predict. He was projected as a long-term prospect for Kentucky when he signed in the spring, but his surprisingly good play on the team’s summer Bahamas trip and during the fall exhibition schedule sparked thoughts of immediate contribution.
Calipari has already planted some seeds that he could end up as one of the odd men out. The coach said last Monday that he called Thiero into his office and told him: “You do know you’re going to be in a dogfight for minutes.” It was telling that he didn’t play at all Friday.
“He’s going to be fine,” Calipari said that night. “I just told him, ‘Just be ready.’”
Thiero will still get chances this season — and that will give him an opportunity to flip this narrative — but his biggest impact on Kentucky basketball is likely well into the future.
As for what Calipari ends up doing with the “3” and “4” spots, it’ll be wait and see. For players like Collins, Livingston and Toppin, a total of 50ish minutes doesn’t seem like nearly enough. Maybe one will get less time than expected. Maybe they’ll play well enough collectively to cut into those guards’ minutes. As the season wears on, injuries and illness are likely to emerge, possibly sorting out the rotation. For a few games, at least.
Calipari obviously wants 11 healthy players for the duration, but that’ll mean cutting three seemingly able Cats partly or wholly out of the picture.
Why not platoon?
The easiest answer, on paper, would be to just play everybody, right? If you have 11 guys capable of meaningful minutes, why not play 11 — similar to what Calipari did to start the 2014-15 season? That “platoon” team went 38-1. Well …
“For two years, I couldn’t recruit anybody,” according to Calipari.
Even with that team, the rotation was pretty close to eight by the end, with Alex Poythress suffering a season-ending injury in December and Marcus Lee’s minutes drying up late.
He said opposing coaches still used the relative lack of playing time — for stars like Karl-Anthony Towns, Willie Cauley-Stein, Devin Booker and others — against Kentucky on the trail.
“You want to go there and play 20 minutes?” Calipari said of what other coaches were telling recruits. “I’m going to start you and you’re going to take all the shots.”
Never again, as he has said in the past.
“I did that one time in my career,” Calipari said. “And I had no choice.”
The choices this time around won’t be much easier. Good problems are still problems.
“He’s a good coach, so he’s going to figure out what works best for this team,” Ware said. “He’s done that all the years he’s been here. He’s figured out what will be the best rotation, or what will be the best situation for players to be on the court together. Whatever he comes up with, we just gotta do it — go out there and play. It’s just about winning games at the end of the day.”
Ware acknowledged that his role — 20.5 minutes and two starts in two games — will change when Tshiebwe returns. Others know that playing time is about to get shuffled around. How it all shakes out is a question without an answer, for the moment.
Will Onyenso really play only a few minutes per game, with as much of a defensive impact it seems he could bring to the court every night? Will minutes have to be limited for Collins, Livingston and/or Toppin, or will one or two of those four stellar guards lose a little time?
Whether it’s Tuesday night against Michigan State or Thursday against South Carolina State or Sunday against Gonzaga, the time when Calipari will have his full arsenal of 11 players is near. And then everyone will start to get a glimpse of which direction this might be headed. In the short term, everyone will continue to get their chances. Once league play begins — and that’s only six weeks away — the rotation will narrow.
And Calipari has talked about it enough that everybody on this team clearly knows that time is coming.
“I’m not sure how that will go,” Livingston said. “But I do know that guys are going to note that in the back of their minds. They’re going to know that — as the season goes on — you’re going to want to be one of those guys that Coach can count on. So a lot more guys are going to go a lot harder. That’s going to make us better as a group, as a whole. So I think that’s good.”
Tuesday
No. 4 Kentucky vs. Michigan State
What: Champions Classic
When: 7 p.m.
Where: Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis
TV: ESPN
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Kentucky 2-0, Michigan State 1-1
Series: Kentucky leads 14-11
Last meeting: Kentucky won 69-62 on Nov. 5, 2019, at the Champions Classic in New York
This story was originally published November 15, 2022 at 7:00 AM.
