Mark Pope might have a problem on his hands. Here’s how his players are dealing with it.
Step away from the TV screen while Kentucky is playing this season, and you might see a whole new basketball team by the time you tune back in.
Case in point, Monday’s 103-62 victory against Wright State, the first game of the Mark Pope era.
With 14:45 left in the first half, the UK lineup still consisted of the starting five: Lamont Butler, Otega Oweh, Jaxson Robinson, Andrew Carr and Amari Williams.
The Cats on the court a little more than four minutes later? Kerr Kriisa, Collin Chandler, Koby Brea, Ansley Almonor and Brandon Garrison.
The same thing happened in both of UK’s exhibition games. In each instance, before the second TV timeout of the first half, 10 Wildcats had played.
And so it will go under Pope. For the time being, at least.
Kentucky’s new coach has no designs on “platooning” — the term coined by predecessor John Calipari to describe the rotations he used during the nearly perfect 2014-15 season — and while Pope’s current roster doesn’t have the top-end talent of that one, it’s similarly stacked with depth and teeming with college basketball experience.
Finding time for all of them — while playing the best lineups possible — will pose a unique challenge.
In the early going, Pope is likely to get plenty of looks at everybody on his roster.
“We still have a long way to go to get in shape to play the way we want to play,” he said after Monday’s opener. “Fortunately, we’re going to lean on our depth right now, until our conditioning really catches up. But we’re trying to do that one step at a time.”
These Cats want to fly up and down the court, and they did so against Wright State, beating the Raiders 36-5 in fast-break points and looking for any opportunity to get out in transition. That style will take a special kind of endurance.
Robinson — the only Wildcat who played for Pope in the past — was part of this system last season at BYU, and he said last month that conditioning was the area where his current team had improved the most from the summer until now. The flip side there is that these Cats had such a long way to go to get where Pope wants them, and that’s clearly a work in progress.
So, what happens when all of his Wildcats are in peak shape for Pope’s style?
“If we can stay healthy, I would like to just keep coming in waves. As much as we can,” he said. “There’s times when the game is not going to allow that, but I would really like to keep coming in waves. I think it’s hard. I think it’s really challenging with the opponents we have.
“It’s interesting. Our guys, they all fit the way we play, but we really have 12 guys with very unique skill sets, and so every time someone new rolls onto the court, it’s kind of like, ‘Ooh, we got a new little tool kit that we can work with.’ As a coach, it’s such a blessing. It allows us to be really creative. And so the game normally makes you constrict to eight or nine — sometimes seven or eight — but I’d like to live in this 10 space as long as the game will let us.”
Pope praised his other two scholarship players — freshmen Trent Noah and Travis Perry — predicting they would have a major impact on UK’s program somewhere down the line, possibly even this season. For now, they’re 11th and 12th on a depth chart filled with upperclassmen.
Finding the time for all of these guys — and keeping everyone happy — might become a problem at some point. But right now, it’s a luxury, and every one of these Wildcats is saying the right things about the situation.
Butler, Robinson, Carr and Williams were all assumed to be starters coming into the season. The fifth spot was a bit of a mystery. Oweh got the nod in both exhibitions and the season opener, and he’s excelled in the role, leading the Cats in scoring Monday night with 21 points, shooting a combined 22-for-26 across the three games and playing stellar defense.
And if Pope were to all of a sudden pull him from the starting lineup, for some reason? So be it.
“I don’t think it really matters,” Oweh told the Herald-Leader. “Because we’re all kind of older, so we know, like, it could change game to game. So you never really know. But on top of that, we all have our eyes on one goal. And we’re all confident in each other to go out there — regardless of who’s out there or who’s starting — to go do what we know we can.
“So I mean, it’s definitely a pride that you got to have just to make sure that you’re doing what you’re supposed to do every game. But … it doesn’t really matter what five you put out there. We feel like we’re gonna go out there and do the same thing.”
Butler, Robinson, Carr and Williams have all said similar things in recent weeks. The credentials of their backups?
▪ Kriisa started 93 of 99 games at the high-major level before he came to Kentucky.
▪ Chandler was a top-40 recruit in high school and arguably has the most long-term potential of anyone on the team.
▪ Brea is rated by ESPN as Kentucky’s top NBA draft prospect for next year.
▪ Almonor is a 1,000-point scorer who averaged 16.4 points per game last season.
▪ Garrison is one year removed from being a McDonald’s All-American and started 29 games as a freshman at Oklahoma State.
All have happily embraced their reserve roles.
The UK basketball rotation
Brea was the Atlantic 10 Sixth Man of the Year twice over the past three seasons with Dayton. The 22-year-old 3-point sharpshooter picked UK over a list of finalists that included Duke, Kansas, North Carolina and UConn. He could have been a starter in his final season of college just about anywhere else in the country, but he’s just fine being the first guy off the bench.
“My approach has definitely changed with time,” Brea said. “Now it’s kind of like a head start for me, you know? I get to see what’s going on on the floor, how they’re guarding, the intensity — I get to see all those things. So by the time I check into the game, I kind of know what to expect. So it’s definitely good.”
Does he prefer that role to starting?
“I’ll take any role, man. I’m a team player,” he said with a smile. “I always say, whatever the coaches want from me, that’s what I’m gonna do. So I’ll accept any role.”
Of the top 10 players in UK’s rotation, Almonor played the fewest minutes (13) Monday, but he put up seven shots and scored 11 points in that time. Kriisa got in for 14 minutes and didn’t score, but he dished out five assists, happily passed up open shots to create for teammates and excitedly encouraged the UK students to chant louder as they lobbied Pope to put Noah in the game.
After the victory, the Wildcats surrounded their coach on the court, where Pope was given a plaque commemorating his first victory. Almonor and Kriisa were the first two players to mob him.
Chandler, who was away from basketball for two years while on a Mormon mission, played 15 minutes in Monday’s opener. He brings a mature perspective to his first season in college.
“It’s kind of like the feeling of being humble, ready to play whatever is needed of you,” he said. “I mean, there’s so many different pieces that I think are trying to be matched together that it’s going to take some time to figure out how to play and who is going to play well together, and that’s something that comes with humility and the willingness to learn and find what’s going to work. And be willing to do what’s going to work.”
On Monday night, Chandler found himself on the court with nine different lineup combinations, playing alongside every one of his teammates except for Robinson. That kind of variety — in games and practice — has been helpful to his personal growth, he said.
“You find out what you need to work on, but also things that you’re good at — things that work. For instance, if I’m playing offense, and something works against Lamont Butler? Well, that’s probably going to work against a lot of people in the country, right?” Chandler said with a grin. “And so that’s something that we try to find is things that we can work on. And the weaknesses that we may see — or the coaches may see — we’re working on every day at practice. We have a lot of time to work on skill and developing those areas that need improvement.”
That kind of attitude can lead to big things, if it’s sustained throughout the season and shared across the roster.
So far, it has been. But the season is still in its first week, and rotations are bound to change — possibly even shorten — as the games go on. What happens then?
The uniqueness of Pope’s personnel should help. As the coach said, while all 12 of these players fit his system, none are necessarily a lesser version of another. They all have different skill sets, and that means players like Chandler (with his potential explosiveness and all-around game) or Almonor (with his ability to fill it up from 3-point range) are unlikely to sit for long stretches, even if they’re never the first player off the bench.
“With this team, anyone can do anything on any given night,” Williams said of his own expectations for the lineup. “Whether it’s the group who did it today — it’s not going to be the same on Saturday. So just knowing that anyone can do that, and just having fun out there, having energy, playing for the guys — that’s the only thing I expect from every game.”
Oweh pointed to two factors that should keep everyone locked in, even if an individual’s own playing time dwindles for stretches here or there: 1) it’s an experienced group that’s self-aware enough to know that you have to stay engaged to stay on the court; 2) they all seem to trust Pope explicitly to make the right decisions for the team while giving everyone a fair shake.
“It’s huge. Huge,” Oweh said of those two factors. “Because, obviously that could cause turmoil (otherwise). But when you’re older, you know, like, ‘Nah, none of that really matters.’ ...
“They just preach selflessness and playing for each other. So, you know, when you have a coaching staff that’s doing that preaching every day, you have to pick it up. Because if you’re not gonna pick it up, someone else is gonna pick it up, and that’s just gonna bump you to the side. And everyone wants to play. Everyone wants to be a factor on this team.”
Can this be sustained? Time will tell. On the surface, it seems like a potentially tough situation could be brewing for Pope, who won’t win every game by 41 points and is just weeks away from a schedule that will likely feature more ranked opponents than not.
“I wouldn’t even say tough,” Oweh countered. “I would say that’s a great situation for a coach to be in, because, like I said, it could change from game to game, depending on who we’re playing. So I feel like it’s better to have more weapons than less — where you’re at a point where, like, ‘Oh, you don’t know who to play.’ He knows exactly who to play. He has a lot of people to play.
“So, I mean, that’s a great position for a coach to be in.”
Next game
Bucknell at No. 23 Kentucky
When: 4 p.m. Saturday
TV: SEC Network+
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Bucknell 1-0, Kentucky 1-0
Series: First meeting
This story was originally published November 7, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
