A UK basketball coach with a unique past. And an interesting approach to recruiting.
Back in April, two former NBA teammates found themselves in very different situations.
Mark Pope had just landed his dream job: head coach at the University of Kentucky, his beloved alma mater and one of college basketball’s blue bloods.
Jason Hart didn’t have a job at all, recently losing his gig as the head coach of G League Ignite after the NBA decided to shutter the program due, primarily, to the NCAA’s reforms to its longstanding name, image and likeness rules.
And so the two men who first got to know each other nearly 25 years earlier were at a crossroads. Pope was tasked with stocking the personnel of one of the sport’s greatest programs from scratch. Hart found himself unemployed — through no fault of his own — faced with figuring out the best next step for his coaching career.
He wasn’t a free agent for long.
Hart, 46, and Pope — six years his senior — got to know each other well during the 2000-01 season that they shared in the Milwaukee Bucks organization, which was Hart’s rookie year in the league. They followed each other’s careers from afar after that, and — a decade later — both were college coaches.
There were friendly exchanges when they found themselves in the same gym, but they weren’t close enough that they were keeping in regular contact. So, when Pope landed the Kentucky job, Hart didn’t reach out to offer congratulations at first, figuring his former teammate was being inundated by such well wishes at one of the busiest times in his life.
So, imagine Hart’s surprise when he received a text message — completely out of the blue — from the new Kentucky coach, asking if he’d be interested in moving with him to Lexington.
“Fortunately, he reached out to me,” Hart said, sitting in an office in the UK basketball practice facility, decked out in Wildcats gear. “... I had a lot of college options. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had some pro options, too. So I just went home. I was fairly unemployed for a short period of time. And then I got this opportunity with Coach Pope, and, you know, to get back in college at this level — that was suitable for me. Because I wanted to stay recruiting. Either I was going to go pro or stay recruiting at the level that I was recruiting at.”
Pope’s first UK roster features 12 scholarship players that had never played for the Wildcats, and his first Kentucky staff includes only one assistant coach that had ever worked for him. That assistant, Cody Fueger, was officially announced as the first member of Pope’s UK staff at 4:47 p.m. on April 22.
That Fueger would follow Pope to Kentucky was assumed in college basketball circles from basically the moment the head coach got the job. Nineteen minutes after Fueger’s hire was officially announced, UK put out a press release saying Hart was also joining the staff.
Pope recently called Hart a “no-brainer” hire for him, adding that if his former teammate hadn’t taken the G League Ignite job three years ago, he’d be a head coach somewhere else by now. And he implied that he might not be able to hold onto him for long.
“He could be an assistant coach on an NBA bench next year and be a head coach in the NBA two years from now,” Pope said. “Like, he’s that good.”
G League Ignite
Hart was a standout at Syracuse — he’s still the Orange’s all-time leader in steals and No. 2 on the career assists list — and his final victory as a college player actually came against Kentucky in the 2000 NCAA Tournament. After that, he spent a decade as an NBA point guard before breaking into coaching, initially in the high school and AAU ranks in his native Los Angeles.
He was then an assistant at Pepperdine for one season before joining Andy Enfield’s first staff at Southern Cal, where he spent eight years. Hart was the Trojans’ associate head coach by the time USC made it to the Elite Eight in 2021 — the furthest the team had advanced in the NCAA Tournament since 1954 — and was 43 years old, still in search of his first head coaching opportunity, when NBA officials reached out following that season.
The G League Ignite program — a team created by the league as a landing spot for star high school recruits opting to bypass college with an eye toward the next year’s NBA draft — was entering its second season and needed a new head coach. G League president Shareef Abdur-Rahim — a close friend of Hart — thought he’d be the right fit for the position.
“I had been in college for 10 years and hadn’t got a head job yet,” Hart said. “So it was time for me to do something. And it was an experience where I could get to coach and the focus wasn’t about moreso winning, it was about — the commissioner wanted draft picks. And so that was an easy call. … So when I had the opportunity to do that and then go get to recruit the elite talent, that was an easy, easy decision for me.”
The win/loss results weren’t good — Ignite was 7-7 in Hart’s first season, 11-21 the next and 2-32 last season — but that wasn’t the objective. The reason for the team’s existence was to get young guys ready for the pros, let them work through their mistakes, and prepare them for what, hopefully, would be long careers at the next level.
In those three years, Hart coached 10 NBA draft picks — including four lottery selections — and regularly went toe to toe with some of the biggest names in basketball on the recruiting trail.
On the court, Hart had to focus more on developing for the long term and pay less attention to the scoreboard. He compared that mentality to what Gregg Popovich went through last season with the San Antonio Spurs, who ended up with a 22-60 record.
Popovich — one of the greatest coaches in the history of the sport — was tasked with guiding rookie center Victor Wembanyama, a generational talent. Winning wasn’t necessarily expected.
“You do have to approach it differently,” Hart said of his own situation. “It’s like Gregg Popovich developing Wembanyama, right? They lost a lot of games. Is he a bad coach? But he didn’t want to bring in any veteran centers, because he was developing Wembanyama.
“So it’s the same situation. We just were doing that in the G League. And for every NBA G league team, they send their rookies down to get development, right? And so they’re judged on how their players are advancing, and their talent, their skill sets for the big team.”
For a competitor like Hart, the situation took some adjustment. And that adjustment, he said, made him a better coach. One of the biggest challenges was the balance of coaching teenagers who skipped college for NBA lottery dreams while also leading guys in their 30s — grinding for one last chance in the league — at the same time.
Players from Hart’s final Ignite draft class told the Herald-Leader over the summer that the coach was instrumental in getting them to the league. “He’s an amazing coach,” said Matas Buzelis, the No. 11 pick in the 2024 draft. Tyler Smith, the No. 33 selection, noted — in a good way — that Hart was “real hard” on him all season long, always pushing for more.
Hart, who spent some time in the developmental league as a player himself, obviously knows what it takes to make it to the NBA and stay there. He also knows that the grown men playing against his young draft hopefuls would give them no quarter on the court.
“Because these guys are trying to get to the NBA,” he said. “The NBA is the best job on Earth, but it’s a ‘no feelings’ (job). Like, they don’t have no feelings for your feelings. So you got to understand this. ...
“They’re not showing you any respect. They don’t care who you are. It’s guys basically chasing the same thing. One is just 17-18, the other is 26-27. So it made it a competitive environment, and it taught those young guys that, you know, you have to be able to compete every day.”
Hart said he also learned to be more patient as a coach. At the pro level, there’s not a whole lot of getting in players’ faces, screaming and yelling about what they’ve done wrong. Instruction and motivation must come in other forms, and Hart has been described by players on this Kentucky team as having more of a calming presence, no doubt a trait partially rooted in his G League experience.
During his time with Ignite, he also quickly realized something else. He loved going after the greatest prospects in the game.
Recruiting at Kentucky
In many ways, the early months of the Pope era have seemed like a complete shift from the program during John Calipari’s 15-year tenure. Yet, a conversation with Hart — especially when the topic is recruiting — sounds familiar, like speaking with any of Calipari’s most celebrated recruiters.
That’s obviously not a bad thing. For all the criticism over the postseason struggles of the final years, the Calipari era was filled with successes, and those on-court results almost always began with major recruiting victories.
Continuing that trend is a major reason Hart wanted to be here.
“When I was at Pepperdine, it was a different level,” he said. “When I was at USC, it was a different level. And then I went to Ignite, it took me to another level. These are parents and kids with an ambition to really play in the NBA. They’re not playing around. So you have to approach it like that.”
Hart liked that aspect of recruiting. Getting in those battles for top-10 prospects, going toe to toe with the blue bloods, and laying out his vision for a promising young player’s future.
He had a major role in helping put the current team together, enjoyed that process and can’t wait to see what the Wildcats do over the course of Pope’s first season. But Hart also said he’s looking forward to bringing in more five-star freshmen, the types of guys projected to be future lottery picks.
Getting players like that — and this will sound familiar to Kentucky fans — means acknowledging those dreams on the recruiting trail.
“I just think that when you’re recruiting this level of talent, and these kids — and obviously Coach Calipari had been doing it — they really, really have pro dreams,” Hart said. “And it can’t be dismissed, you know what I mean? In terms of, like, that’s their focus. And there’s nothing wrong with that. … Parents with that level of talent — they’re just not letting them go to anybody.”
While with the Ignite program, Hart battled Calipari and the Kentucky staff in several recruitments. He landed guys like Buzelis, Smith, Ron Holland and Leonard Miller — all prominent UK targets at various times — and coached Scoot Henderson and Jaden Hardy, also major Calipari targets.
The narrative during Ignite’s heyday was that such players simply wanted to go make a quick buck before they started their NBA careers, but Hart found, in most cases, it was more a matter of convincing recruits and their families that his path would be best for them in the long run. Still, when NIL exploded in the NCAA, the NBA saw no need for Ignite and shuttered the program.
But the lessons learned from Hart’s three years recruiting at the highest levels there were valuable, even if the immediate objectives for Pope’s Wildcats and the NBA’s Ignite program are wildly different.
Recruiting players for Pope — with the backing of the UK brand, as well as the new head coach’s unique personality and fast-paced style of play — has been a blast so far.
After a spring of cleaning up in the transfer portal — putting together a roster that’s now skyrocketed to No. 9 in the AP rankings after just two weeks — the UK staff earned 2025 commitments from star recruits Jasper Johnson, Malachi Moreno and Acaden Lewis, the No. 5-ranked group nationally for next season. And the staff isn’t finished, with top-10 prospect Caleb Wilson viewed as a possible UK lean and other star recruits still on the wish list.
While Pope’s UK teams are expected to have much more season-to-season continuity than Calipari’s rosters, the new staff won’t be shying away from star recruits. They’ll just be going all in on the ones that best fit Pope’s outlook.
“We strictly recruited to the coach’s system,” Hart said of their successes so far. “At the end of the day, that makes it easier. Instead of you trying to guess what he wants. We just recruited to his style of play, which will make the talent look better.”
A good fit for the Wildcats
While Hart is known for his recruiting chops, that’s not his sole role in this program, and he obviously isn’t doing it alone on the trail. He referred to Fueger and associate head coach Alvin Brooks III as “elite” recruiters in their own right, saying the three assistants who will most often accompany Pope on the trail meshed well right off the bat.
Hart is also helping Fueger — known as the “offensive coordinator” behind Pope’s system — with the Wildcats’ scoring attack, as well as working with the team’s point guards. The early reviews from that position group have been positive.
“J-Hart, he’s very intelligent,” said starting point guard Lamont Butler. “He knows how to manipulate the game as a guard, and that’s kind of what he’s been teaching me. I mean, of course we’ve been working on a lot of skill work. Working on floaters, shots coming off the pick and roll. But when I talk to him and break down film, he’s talking about manipulating the game. Knowing when to come down and shoot, when to come down and get a pick and roll, when to come down and just feel out the game, when to come down and attack.”
Hart downplayed his own NBA playing career as a factor in getting recruits to come to UK and then getting them to listen once they’re here, but Butler said it was a bigger deal than his coach will admit.
“Of course. I mean, he’s done it at the highest level of basketball. So he definitely knows what he’s talking about, and it works. So who am I to not listen to what he says?” he said. “I take everything that he says to the heart, and I just try to continue to improve.”
Kerr Kriisa, the Cats’ sparkplug point guard off the bench, nodded at the mention of Hart’s name.
“I love him. I mean, he’s great,” he said. “I feel like he’s like a perfect piece for the guards. And for the whole team, honestly. He might not say much throughout the whole practice, but the times that he does say (something), it’s super efficient what he says. It’s on point. And his energy is super contagious, too. He’s a completely different style.”
Kriisa said when players are clearly putting too much pressure on themselves or seemingly get down after a mistake on the court, Hart is there to reassure them.
“And then you start thinking the other way, and then you’re more loosened up,” he continued. “So I feel like Coach Hart is just like a perfect glue guy for us.”
Meanwhile, Hart has enjoyed diving back into college basketball.
This move was a big one for him. The Inglewood, California, native was able to return to L.A. for his entire coaching career to this point. He proudly noted that his two sons got to live in one house growing up, attending the same elementary, middle and high schools, a rarity for the kids of a coach.
“I’ve been blessed,” Hart said. “I’m probably one of the luckiest coaches — getting to retire and get a job in Los Angeles.”
His youngest son is a senior in high school and stayed back home. His oldest is a sophomore on the Long Beach State basketball team. As Hart has settled in Lexington, he’s also gotten reacquainted with Pope after so many years of keeping tabs on each other from different time zones. Not much has changed there.
“Same as he is now,” Hart says. “A lot of energy. A good dude. Everybody loved him. He never changed who he was from when I played with him as a rookie to who he is now.”
And whenever Hart’s name is mentioned, Pope perks up a little. In a recent conversation with the Herald-Leader, the UK coach used the word “special” several times to describe his old friend.
“Jason Hart has got unbelievable integrity. He is uncompromising. He’s got a great joy and spirit about him. He is passionate about this game. He is a relentless worker. He is a relationship builder,” Pope said. “... There’s relationship builders that are like, you know, salesmen. And there’s relationship builders that are actually building relationships because they actually like people, and he’s that.
“And he’s super respectful with people. He’s coached, I think in the last three years, it’s some crazy number, nine draft picks or whatever. … He’s as good as they come. He’s been a head coach, he’s been an assistant coach, he’s been an associate head coach, he’s coached professionally, he’s coached in college. We played together.”
Hart has actually coached 10 draft picks in the past three seasons, and several at Southern Cal before that. Pope hasn’t coached any such players … yet. That last fact will certainly change very soon. And, now that they’re together again, Pope and Hart have big plans for the future.
“You know, if I had a son and I was going to put him in a program and trust somebody, I’d be like, ‘Man, this Jason Hart is really special.’ Like, I trust him,” Pope said. “I’m telling you, he’s as good as there is.”
