What’s the latest with Kentucky’s Kerr Kriisa? It doesn’t sound like he’ll be back soon
It appears that Mark Pope’s Kentucky basketball team is likely to be shorthanded at point guard for the foreseeable future.
Pope offered up the first in-depth update in weeks on the status of Kerr Kriisa on Thursday afternoon, and it doesn’t sound as if the talented playmaker is close to a return to game action.
“He’s not doing anything active on the court yet,” Pope said. “But he’s doing much more active stuff in the weight room and in the training room, and so the next step is just to see what that response is like. It’s a matter of how quickly and if you can get over the soreness in that step.
“And then it’s a matter of getting on the court to do some light things on the court and see how quickly soreness — you’re just healing bone, right? And it’s a complicated, not-great, blood-flow, bone. And so that part is — there’s no magic wand to it.”
Kriisa was injured in the second half of Kentucky’s comeback victory over Gonzaga in Seattle on Dec. 7. Within 24 hours of that game, UK announced that the 6-foot-3 guard from Estonia would be sidelined indefinitely but the injury was “not considered to be season-ending.”
Pope confirmed a few days later that Kriisa had already had surgery on his foot and there was an initial mention of six weeks as a possible timeline for his return to the court.
It’s now been more than eight weeks since Kriisa’s surgery, and he still hasn’t been able to go through any vigorous basketball activities.
Kentucky has won plenty of big games with Kriisa on the sidelines — victories over Louisville, Florida, Mississippi State, Texas A&M and Tennessee on that list — but the Wildcats have also struggled at times to fill in the gaps at point guard, even before Lamont Butler went down with his most recent injury.
Kriisa, an innovative playmaker offensively and a hard-playing defender, prided himself on bringing an intense pace to the court, and that style was expected to be a perfect match for Pope’s vision on how his Wildcats would play.
With Butler and Kriisa both out, that’s been missing from Kentucky’s repertoire.
“Our lack of pace right now has been a little bit troublesome for us,” Pope said this week. “We’re dealing with, you know, we’re trying to work on a lot of things, and so our pace is suffering right now. And that hurts us a little bit.”
Since Butler was injured in the win over Texas A&M three weeks ago, the Cats endured a run of four losses in five games heading into a home date with South Carolina (0-9 in the SEC) on Saturday afternoon.
The offense has still been efficient, but shot creation has been a major issue at times over that stretch — especially early on in the 98-84 loss to Ole Miss on Tuesday night — and ball pressure on defense has been a glaring shortcoming for the Wildcats, who forced an average of just 5.4 turnovers over those five games. Ole Miss had 24 assists to just one turnover Tuesday.
Kentucky goes into the weekend with the No. 2 offensive efficiency rating nationally — according to the KenPom numbers — but ranked No. 108 defensively, last in the SEC. The Cats are also 351st nationally (out of 364 teams) in defensive turnover rate.
“In the general sense, our presentation on the ball has left us wanting,” Pope said Thursday. “We’re the least disruptive team in the league, and, in some ways, we’re hemorrhaging in some other spaces.”
Pope said Thursday that Butler was going to do some non-contact drills in practice later that day and see how he felt Friday. He didn’t put a specific date on a return to the court for Butler — and didn’t rule out Saturday against South Carolina as a possibility — but Pope made clear he wants to give his star point guard the best chance to stay on the court once he does make that return.
That’s the stance that UK took with power forward Andrew Carr, who sat out to rest a back injury in recent weeks but played 23 minutes against Ole Miss on Tuesday and felt OK physically coming out of that one.
“I’m a little in the same frame of mind that I was with Andrew, where I would like to get him back in a position where we have the best chance of not having another setback,” Pope said of Butler. “I’m hoping that’s where we are with Drew, where now he can just grow his way back into the game.”
The current situation has led to Pope starting three off-ball guards — Jaxson Robinson, Otega Oweh and Koby Brea — in the backcourt, with Robinson as the de facto point guard in the lineup, others pitching in, and 7-foot center Amari Williams handling some traditional playmaking duties. Off the bench, freshmen Collin Chandler and Travis Perry have played more minutes.
After South Carolina on Saturday, the Cats have a return game with No. 4 Tennessee (in Rupp Arena on Tuesday night), then a trip to Texas next weekend, followed by a home game against Vanderbilt and back-to-back road matchups with No. 3 Alabama and Oklahoma.
The Cats will have just eight regular-season games remaining after this weekend, with the finale coming March 8 at Missouri.
Judging from Pope’s comments Thursday, there’s no guarantee that Kriisa will be back by then.
“That’s where he is right now. He’s still limited to the training room and the weight room, and at some point, when he meets those pain-threshold benchmarks, he’ll move onto the court and start a light process there. And then it’s kind of rediscovery about seeing like, ‘How much can he handle? How quick is the recovery?’ You’re always wondering, ‘What does it feel like the next day?’ (That’s) probably where we’re most interested in finding data.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2025 at 1:50 PM.
