Jaxson Robinson will miss the rest of Kentucky basketball season. ‘Super big loss for us’
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Game day: No. 1 Auburn 94, No. 17 Kentucky 78
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Auburn in Rupp Arena.
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Mark Pope’s Kentucky basketball team suffered two major losses Saturday afternoon.
The Wildcats were defeated 94-78 by No. 1 Auburn in Rupp Arena, a lopsided loss with just one week remaining in the regular season. But that was just a single game.
What Pope said afterward will have a much more lasting effect on what’s left of this season.
The UK coach confirmed in his postgame press conference that Jaxson Robinson — the team’s second-leading scorer and a key cog in Pope’s high-octane offense — will miss the remainder of the 2024-25 season with a right wrist injury.
Pope said Robinson will have surgery on his shooting wrist Wednesday. That procedure will bring an end to his college basketball career, which has spanned five seasons, the last three of them with Pope as his head coach.
Robinson injured his wrist during a practice session on Feb. 7, a day before the Wildcats played South Carolina in Rupp Arena. He was listed as questionable for that game but ended up playing through the injury, though he shot just 2-for-8 from the floor and finished with six points in the 80-57 victory over the SEC’s last-place team.
Robinson then missed four consecutive games before attempting a return in Kentucky’s game at Oklahoma on Wednesday night. The Cats defeated the Sooners 83-82, but Robinson did not play in the second half. Pope said afterward that his wrist “did not respond great” to his return to play. On Saturday, he delivered much worse news.
“We kind of came to the final conclusion last night that he’s going to get surgery,” Pope said after UK’s loss to Auburn. “So he’s going Wednesday to the world’s specialist to have surgery on his wrist. He’s got a torn subsheath to his ECU tendon. And so what’s happening is it’s slipping out. And when he went down, we kind of knew that he was going to need surgery, but he just wanted so badly to play that he rehabbed it and had an injection to try and make it functional. And then he was doing OK. And then he went down in the first half at Oklahoma.”
Pope, who attended three years of medical school at Columbia University before dropping out to pursue a coaching career, explained in more detail exactly what was happening with Robinson’s injury.
“It’s in a groove, and there’s a sheath around it that holds it in place, and that’s ... just ripped a little bit,” he said. “And so now it’s coming out of the groove. And after the hit, it actually relocated a little more, and there’s just no way that he’s going to be able to play.”
Pope said the timetable for a 100% recovery is three months, which would have Robinson back on the court in early June. That means he will miss the NBA Draft Combine — scheduled for May 11-18 — though he might be able to go through some team workouts upon his return.
Robinson was viewed as a possible NBA draft pick coming into this season, but he was not in draft range in either of the updated rankings released by ESPN and The Athletic earlier this week.
Jaxson Robinson’s season is over
The leading scorer on Pope’s final BYU team, Robinson was one of the most celebrated additions to the 2024-25 Kentucky roster, pulling out of last year’s NBA draft just before the deadline and immediately deciding to follow his head coach to Kentucky.
Robinson played his first season at Texas A&M, arriving on campus as a 17-year-old college freshman, before transferring to Arkansas for one year. He ended up at BYU after that, eventually forming a close bond with Pope and the Cougars coaching staff, which included Cody Fueger, who is now a UK assistant.
He started all 24 games he appeared in for the Wildcats this season, averaging 13.0 points, 3.5 rebounds and 1.7 assists per game. Robinson was second on the team in scoring and 3-point field goals, shooting 37.6% from long range, a career high in his five seasons of college basketball.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Koby Brea, the team’s leading 3-point shooter. “Super big loss for us, obviously, as a team. But, more importantly for us, we’re just thinking about him. He’s an amazing human being. I hate to see him go down like that and have to play his last game without even knowing it. We’re just going to continue to be there for him. He’s a super important piece to our team. He’s done great things for us, helped us along the way, and he’s going to continue to do that.
“But most importantly, you know, we just got to be there for him.”
Brea has started alongside Lamont Butler, Otega Oweh, Andrew Carr and Amari Williams in place of Robinson in recent games, and that’s expected to be UK’s first five moving forward.
Butler has missed eight games this season with shoulder and ankle injuries, and Kerr Kriisa — the team’s backup point guard — hasn’t played since Dec. 7 due to a foot injury. Butler is still playing through his shoulder injury, and Kriisa appears unlikely to return to the court this season.
With those two players sidelined, Robinson became the Cats’ top option at point guard. His season-ending injury is likely to lead to more minutes for freshmen Travis Perry and Collin Chandler, with other guards like Oweh and Brea picking up more of the scoring slack.
Robinson’s absence will ripple throughout the roster.
“I think everybody has the mindset of trying to be able to step up and help out whenever, however they possibly can,” Carr said Saturday. “And they’ve been able to consistently get better and better throughout the season. And as tough as it is for Jaxson, you know, we all try to be there for him. We know he’d kill and die to be out there with us. And so everybody knows to go out there and do it for him, too.”
With Robinson now officially out for the rest of the season and Kriisa not yet back in practice for the Wildcats, even more of the pressure will be on Butler at the point guard spot.
And Pope, who has been juggling lineup changes for the past three months, will have the task of piecing together a plan the rest of the way.
Kentucky (19-10, 8-8 SEC) hosts LSU on Tuesday night before finishing up the regular season at No. 14 Missouri. After that, the SEC and NCAA tournaments.
“I mean, we’ve been playing with different lineups,” Butler said of the situation moving forward. “It’s been weird. And we’ve got to find joy in that. We’ve got to find joy in having other guys step up and play positions that they haven’t normally played. It’s a learning curve for everybody. And it’s just another step in the chapter. We just have to continue to get better. And the season’s coming to an end, so we gotta get better fast, for sure.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2025 at 4:58 PM.
