The ‘energy dude’ on this UK basketball team is just scratching the surface of his game
Still basking in the feeling of knocking off Duke in the Champions Classic last Tuesday night, Mark Pope and two of his stars from that victory sat at a table and recapped the big win.
Toward the end of the postgame presser, Pope spoke of sophomore big man Brandon Garrison’s contributions to Kentucky’s cause on one of college basketball’s biggest early-season stages.
During one key stretch in the second half, Garrison scored six straight points for the Wildcats, keeping them close to the sixth-ranked Blue Devils — and keeping the UK faithful in Atlanta energized — with his spirited play on both sides of the court.
“BG running the floor was so important for us at the five,” Pope said.
Andrew Carr — the leading scorer for the Cats that night — nodded emphatically at this point.
“BG banging that 3 was really important for us,” Pope continued.
“It was a 2,” Carr interjected.
“It was a 2?” Pope asked, turning in Carr’s direction while junior guard Otega Oweh, seated on his other side, expressed genuine shock, bending over to look more closely at the box score sitting on the table.
“Ahhh, geez. You just ruined a great night,” Pope said. “I was so excited for BG. He’s been dying to get one of those. Man, he wants it so bad. That makes me kind of sad.”
“Yeah,” Oweh agreed.
Obviously, no nights were actually ruined for the Wildcats, who defeated Duke 77-72 for a statement victory in the second week of the season. Pope and his two players talked a little more about the near-3-pointer from the 6-foot-10, 250-pound forward before being excused from the podium for a post-midnight flight back to Lexington.
Nearly a week later, Garrison was all smiles regarding his role in Kentucky’s big win.
“It just meant a lot, because I knew my team needed something from me,” he said. “Because I started off the game slow, so Coach is just telling me, ‘Just pick it up.’ So I felt like I just picked it up right there. Just helped my team get the win.”
Without Garrison’s flurry, the Cats might not have gotten the victory.
He checked into the game with 9:10 left — Kentucky down 61-55 — and had an immediate impact.
After making a defensive play near the basket to initiate a free-for-all battle for possession, Garrison flew through the air to snag a 50/50 ball, which UK point guard Lamont Butler took the other way. Butler missed a layup attempt, but Garrison was trailing the play and put it right back to cut Duke’s lead to four points.
A little while later, he caught a pass from Carr at the top of the key and let it loose. The shot dropped for what appeared to be the first 3-pointer of his college career — getting a big clap from Pope in the background — but Garrison’s foot was clearly on the line.
On Duke’s next possession, the UK big man switched onto freshman sensation Cooper Flagg and stayed in front of him, forcing Flagg to take (and miss) a long 2-point attempt. Garrison ran the floor from there, and teammate Koby Brea hit him in transition for two more points.
That play cut Duke’s lead to 63-61, and — as Garrison came off the court for the next TV timeout — Kerr Kriisa and Ansley Almonor bounded off the UK bench to give him high-fives and celebratory shoves. Not long after that timeout, Garrison worked around a screen and blocked a 3-point attempt by Kon Kneuppel — a projected NBA lottery pick — and by the end of the night found himself playing in the last minute of a game that went down to the final seconds.
“I was really proud with — just in general — his energy on the floor,” Pope said a couple of days after the win. “… I thought he made massive, massive energy plays in the second half. They were incredible. You know, the loose ball that he came up with. It was thrown way up in the air, and he went and just won it in a sea of bodies. The putback that he had, that was in transition, where Lamont was just blistering pace down the floor, and BG had the energy to run and kind of finish, clean up that. When nobody else did. He was the only guy still running.
“He had a huge impact on this game, and it’s fun to see. I think he was really proud of himself, and he should be, because he’s been focusing on some specific things, and he executed them well.”
Brandon Garrison’s big gains
The players on this Kentucky team appear to genuinely like each other — forming a bond early in the offseason that is reaping immediate rewards on the court — but there’s often a little extra glint in the eye when the Wildcats talk about Garrison.
Last month, Pope pointed out that his young post player got fatigued pretty quickly in one of the team’s exhibition games before discovering some extra energy as soon as he found himself with an open 3-point look.
“He barely made it down the court, but when that ball hit his hands at the top of the key, he was like, ‘I’m firing this one away!’ He looked fresh as a daisy. It was beautiful,” the head coach joked.
Then there was the playful exchange in the press conference after the Duke game, which seems to jibe with the general vibe around Garrison.
Asked if the older Cats consider the sophomore to be like the “little brother” on this team, Butler — a 6-2 point guard in his fifth year of college — laughed.
“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “That’s my little guy right there, for sure. Even though he’s 6-10, that’s my little guy.”
Garrison, it might be easy to overlook, is actually the youngest player in Pope’s 10-man rotation. Of that group, seven are seniors. Oweh is a junior. Collin Chandler is a freshman, but he delayed college by two years out of high school for a Mormon mission trip.
That makes Garrison, who turned 20 years old in late March, the baby of the bunch. He also has some of the biggest upside on the team.
Garrison is the only McDonald’s All-American on this roster — he earned that honor as part of the 2023 recruiting class — and he started 29 of 32 games as a freshman at Oklahoma State last season. There, he was known as a super-efficient finisher around the basket and an above-average post defender, especially relative to his young age.
There’s so much more to unlock in his game, however, and Pope and his staff are just starting to see the possibilities come out on the court.
Clearly, his energy can be contagious.
“That was huge,” Butler said of Garrison’s second-half flurry against Duke. “He just brought the energy — to the crowd, to us. He was just out there making plays, like we’ve seen him do all summer and all fall. And when he’s doing that, it’s definitely big for our team.”
Garrison knows he can have that effect.
“I’m an energy dude,” he said. “And I feel like (when) my energy is up, and I’m running the court, blocking shots, my team feeds off that.”
Getting to a spot where he can do those things for extended periods has been a process.
Playing in Pope’s system — one in which the coach wants his players to go as soon as they get the ball — requires peak conditioning. Several of the Wildcats have talked about how much work it took to transition to such a style over the past few months.
As one of the biggest, most inexperienced players on the team, Garrison has an even bigger challenge there. Relative to the rest of the team, he had quite a bit of ground to make up.
“I feel like it’s improved a lot,” Garrison said, adding that he’s been working extensively with head strength coach Randy Towner, who — along with senior athletic trainer Brandon Wells — Pope has praised for helping get his guys into game shape at a rapid rate.
Towner, who worked with Pope at Utah Valley from 2016-18, was most recently with the Milwaukee Bucks organization. Garrison said Towner has brought an NBA-level mindset to his own conditioning work and has spent extra time with him before and after practice.
“There were a couple times in practice where he was just like dog-tired. He couldn’t really give us nothing,” Butler said of Garrison’s stamina when he first got to campus. “But he’s just been working all summer and fall, and just to see how he’s improved — to go out there in big games like that one and be a big impact — it was great to see that.”
Pope said Garrison has been “really diligent with his conditioning” and the UK coaching staff has been digging deeper into the numbers to figure out how to best utilize his time on the court. He played 22.6 minutes per game as a starter at Oklahoma State last season and has averaged 18.6 minutes off the bench through the Wildcats’ first three games.
In that time, he’s averaged 6.7 points, 4.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game, the latter number indicative of his skill as a passer, something Pope specifically looks for in his post players.
Garrison didn’t attempt a single 3-pointer in 32 games as a freshman, but there were whispers throughout the summer and fall that he was capable of hitting long-range shots. As the season got closer, Garrison himself proudly declared that fans would see that side of his game soon.
He still hasn’t made one — Garrison is 0-for-4 from deep, counting the two exhibition games — but his teammates swear he’s been making them in practice, Pope wants him to keep shooting in games, and the long 2 last week against Duke is a sign of things to come.
The UK coach was asked before the regular-season opener if he might rescind Garrison’s “green light” to shoot from 3-point range in the coming weeks, if the shots didn’t fall.
“Yeah, we don’t do that,” he quickly answered, later pointing to a wide-open shot that Garrison had taken and missed. “I want him to take that shot every time. He’s gonna make a lot of them.”
And Garrison seems to have a handle on the situation. He said Pope’s green light is dependent on his ability to show he can make open shots in practice, as well as a demonstration that he’s continuing to work on that aspect of his game. “Not just like jacking them if I’m not working on it,” he said.
Becoming a consistent 3-point shooter is just one more step toward evolving into the complete player that Pope and his teammates think Garrison can be.
“Every day you can see him out there running hard,” Butler said. “When he runs the floor, it’s amazing. Because he’s a big guy, but he’s very mobile. … And defensively, he’s able to bring his great energy, blocking shots, guarding guards and contesting shots.
“So it’s great to be seeing him improve all year. And I think it’s just square one for him. He’s got a lot more to prove.”
This story was originally published November 19, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
