Three freshmen got chances for Kentucky this season. Mark Pope will need them in March
It was about midway through the second half of the final Kentucky basketball home game of the season. The Cats were rolling, and Collin Chandler was feeling it.
The freshman from Utah — the first recruit of the Mark Pope era, in fact — had already set a career high in scoring. Chandler hit a pair of 3-pointers just before halftime — his first two shot attempts of the night — and he hit another not long after coming off the bench in the second half.
And then, with Kentucky up 35 points on LSU and about 25 seconds still left on the shot clock, Chandler let one fly from the Rupp Arena logo. The freshman was standing as close to Pope on the sideline as he was to the 3-point line itself. An LSU defender was near enough to contest the shot. Chandler let it go anyway, backpedaling confidently down the court as he watched the ball drop toward the basket.
It clanked loudly off the rim. Pope stared into the distance.
A couple of days later, the Kentucky coach smiled at the mention of that sequence. Obviously, everything worked out fine. The outcome wasn’t in question at that point. UK earned its most lopsided win of the league schedule, and Chandler ended up with perhaps his best performance in 24 games as a UK player.
It clearly wasn’t a shot Pope wanted to see, but what did it say about the confidence that Chandler showed in taking it — with the postseason right around the corner — and would the young Wildcat have had that confidence three months ago?
“Man, that’s a fun question to play with,” Pope said.
Another smile crept across his face, and then he took a more serious tone.
“I like our young guys, because our young guys are trying to be unafraid of failing,” Pope said. “They’re trying to fail fast. Like, we believe in failing fast. I just talked about this with the group last night. Failing fast is really important. And Collin played a terrific game. I mean, just speaking of that one shot where — I mean, I think he knew, and everybody knew, and we knew that he pushed the envelope a little too far, right? But that’s how you learn, is by failing fast. By stepping out of bounds, you learn what the boundaries are. If you never actually get close to the boundaries, you never learn, you never grow.
“So we want to fail fast, fail fast, fail fast. We’re not afraid of failing. Like, fail fast, gather data, and let’s go. Let’s go be bold and courageous and fearless and aggressive out on the court, especially as we’re getting to postseason — that’s where we want to live. And, so, I actually love that moment.”
Pope said he met with Chandler the morning after the game, and the player and coach joked about that moment in particular.
“And I love it,” Pope said. “Like, that’s how we grow. And we want to fail as fast as we can, because failure is not final. Failure is just a step in the process of growing. And so the more failures you can stack close together, the more you learn, the more you grow, the more data you collect, the better player that you become. And being unafraid of that — that was the best part of that moment, is he was unafraid. He’s like, ‘Hey, man, I think I’m feeling it. I don’t know if this is right or not, but I’m going for it!’ And that’s why he’s going to be a really, really special player.”
Pope then relayed a message from his wife, Lee Anne, a saying he said she tells him all the time: “Birds are never afraid to land on a branch, not knowing whether it’s going to break or not, because they can fly.”
He said he wants his players to approach the game that way.
“I want them to feel like, ‘I’m not afraid of a mistake, because we can fix it. We can go make up for it. Like, I can learn and grow.’ And so that was actually a super fun moment for me, watching him grow.”
Kentucky’s freshmen find their way
For Chandler and his fellow freshmen — Trent Noah and Travis Perry — there has been a whole lot of growth over the past nine months, dating back to when they arrived on UK’s campus as the college basketball newcomers on a team filled with veterans.
Perry and Noah were — by every account — penciled in as the 11th and 12th players on the Kentucky depth chart. Maybe they’d play, maybe they wouldn’t. If they did, it probably wouldn’t be much.
Chandler brought higher expectations but also massive uncertainty. He was a former top-40 recruit, but he hadn’t played basketball in two years, taking a self-imposed break from the game to serve on a mission trip overseas. Everyone agreed he had talent, but how long would it take for that talent to be realized at the college level, after such a long hiatus?
For most of the first part of the season, those three players did a lot of watching from the UK bench. They got some time in the Cats’ early blowouts, but not against the big boys on Kentucky’s schedule.
Chandler played two minutes in UK’s win over Duke, the lone freshman to see the court that night. None of them got off the bench in the loss to Clemson. At one point, Noah logged only four minutes — all of them in an 88-54 blowout of Brown — in a span that lasted more than six weeks and stretched into SEC play.
But as injuries mounted, opportunities knocked. And the freshmen answered.
None of them were perfect, by any means. There were plenty of mistakes and growing pains. Mismatches on the court, opposing coaches who attacked what they saw as UK’s weak spots.
But one by one, they had their breakthrough moments.
When Lamont Butler, Kerr Kriisa and Jaxson Robinson — the Cats’ top three options at point guard — were all sidelined, Perry stepped in as an unexpected starter. His confidence grew.
“I feel like I’m really focused on trying to be more physical at the point guard spot,” Perry said recently. “You know, that’s something that I think goes a long way for us — running the offense, on the defensive side of the ball — just trying to control everything I can control from that spot. Being physical does a lot of that. And just being more aggressive. Picking my spots when to be aggressive, when to make plays for myself, make plays for my teammates. And then also trying to be more aggressive on defense. Take a couple risks every now and then.”
Noah hit a huge 3-pointer in UK’s upset victory at Tennessee and nailed three more long-range shots in the return game in Rupp, scoring a career-high 11 points to help the Cats earn a sweep of the Vols.
“I think games like this, it’s kind of a preview of the postseason,” he said that night. “I mean, that was a real tournament game.”
Chandler, who often looked lost in the early going, is playing with a lot more intent as the season nears its end.
“Man, there’s no more messing around. We gotta grow up,” he said. “We gotta be able to contribute. Because our guys need us. With the injuries — or whatever has happened — they need us to play. They need us to step up. So that’s our focus. We’re doing it for them and for this team, and hopefully they can rely on us and trust us coming in to play for them.”
Tournament time is here
Kentucky is going into the postseason — the SEC Tournament this week and the NCAA Tournament after that — with Robinson and Kriisa officially ruled out for the season.
Butler is playing with an injured shoulder. Andrew Carr has been battling through a back ailment. There could be other injuries. If UK makes a run, there will almost certainly be foul trouble — or some other unforeseen setback — that causes a ripple effect across the roster.
And the deeper the Wildcats play into March, the more likely it will be that at least one of these freshmen will need to step up and make a difference. And do so in a crucial moment, on the biggest stage in college basketball.
When faced with looking ahead to such a scenario — and this was before Robinson reinjured his wrist, ending his season — Pope said the past several weeks should have his young guys more prepared for that moment than they would have been otherwise.
“I think there will be less wondering and more excitement, right?” he said.
There’s no need to wonder how they’ll react in such a situation. They’ve been through it now. All three of these players have played in crunch time of close games against teams that could realistically make a deep run in this NCAA Tournament.
And they’ve come out stronger than they were before. For all three of these players, the growth — from last June to November to now — has been apparent. The seeds of it were planted away from the spotlight of these big SEC games.
Whether it was Perry or Chandler trying to score against Butler, or Noah attempting to defend a driving Otega Oweh, the older Wildcats on this team helped bring the college basketball newbies along. It was difficult — often seemingly impossible — when they first got to campus.
“It just took some time,” Noah said. “And whenever I got here, it just took a lot of blow-bys by Otega. I mean, he was killing me whenever I first got here. I was chasing him around, like I was crazy. I couldn’t guard him. But just getting to talk to him after he just blows by and dunks it, I got to go on the sideline and just ask him what I need to do. How I need to make my mind speed up and my head speed up to kind of get angles and gain an advantage.”
Butler and Oweh and Carr and all the rest gave the freshmen pointers. They were all in the same spot once — the best players on their high school team, trying to find their way against bigger and faster and just plain better competition.
Oweh nodded along when Noah’s comments about the junior guard blowing by him in practice were repeated. He remembers where these freshmen started. He’s also seen how far they’ve come.
And with the regular season behind them, Oweh doesn’t see them as freshmen anymore.
“They play a big role,” he said. “Obviously, we have a lot of older guys, and then on top of that, we have a deep bench. So the bench got even deeper when they started playing, and obviously now we’re at the point of the year where freshmen aren’t freshmen. They gotta be sophomores. So I feel like Collin, he’s starting to understand it now. Same with Travis and Trent. Like, when they come in, they just got to uplift the tempo, uplift the pace.”
In the final game of the regular season — Kentucky’s 91-83 win at No. 15 Missouri on Saturday — Chandler, Noah and Perry all contributed as the Cats got out to a sizable lead in the first half. About midway through the second half, Chandler scored on a transition layup. The very next trip down the court, he got the ball in the corner and let a 3-pointer fly. The shot went through the net, and Chandler ended up on the ground, knocked back into the UK bench area.
Oweh erupted out of his seat and crouched down to get in Chandler’s face as the freshman popped up and ran back down the sideline on defense. As the ball went the other way, Oweh turned toward the crowd, still hopping up and down with excitement, an expression of pure joy on his face.
All three of these freshmen are likely to hear their names called during tournament time. If that two weeks is going to extend to three or four, the older Wildcats will almost certainly be the stars.
But to make a run, Kentucky’s young role players will need to help out in whatever way they can.
“Collin and Trent and Travis Perry — they’re just incredibly important to our stretch run here,” Pope said. “Those guys are ready. They’re capable. And those guys have got to step up and make huge plays for us, like veteran, experienced players. And they can. Those guys are really crucial. And the success that we have is going to be, in some part, dependent on them being great. And they’re ready to do it.”
