Five big questions for Mark Pope and the Kentucky basketball team this offseason
A magical Kentucky basketball season is over, a few wins shy of the final destination.
UK’s loss to Tennessee in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament marked the end of Mark Pope’s first run as the head coach of the Wildcats, and — while he didn’t get the banner that he and his team had hoped for — the roster he put together left a lasting impression.
Kentucky advanced past the first weekend of March Madness for the first time in six years. The Cats managed victories against foes such as Duke, Louisville and Tennessee (twice), and they tied a record for most wins over AP top 15 teams with eight. UK won seven games as an underdog.
It wasn’t the ending that Pope envisioned for his first roster, but that’s usually how it works in college basketball when the standards are set so high. So, what will he do for an encore?
Here are five questions that will be answered in the coming months.
Who returns to Kentucky basketball?
One of the biggest immediate questions regarding this UK team will obviously be who sticks around to play for the next one.
With Kerr Kriisa entering the transfer portal Monday, as expected, that leaves five scholarship players from the 2024-25 roster with eligibility remaining.
The biggest name on that list is Otega Oweh, who came to Kentucky after two years at Oklahoma with the reputation as a high-level defender and ended this season as the leading scorer on a UK offense that was consistently ranked as one of the best in college basketball.
Oweh, who has one season of NCAA eligibility left, had no response when asked Friday night about his future, but that seemed to be related more to his disappointment with the moment than any indecisiveness on his part.
He is expected to go through the NBA draft process, but he’s not currently projected to be a pick this year. If he does return to college — and that’s the expectation — it would be a major surprise if he played anywhere other than Kentucky next season.
Sophomore forward Brandon Garrison — the only McDonald’s All-American on Pope’s first roster — said Friday that he would consult with his family and his agent in the coming days. He could also test the NBA draft process, though he’s also not projected as a pick. Garrison implied that — if he does return to school — he would be back at UK next season.
Trent Noah and Travis Perry — both freshmen and Kentucky natives — spoke Friday night about a future for UK basketball that very much included them. They’re expected to return.
Fellow freshman Collin Chandler could be the most interesting case.
Chandler was Pope’s first commitment last April, and he left his home state of Utah — where he had been committed to Pope at BYU for more than two years — to come to Kentucky, fresh off a two-year church mission trip that sidelined his basketball career.
The 21-year-old sophomore-to-be is getting married in early May — his fiancée is a Utah college student from his hometown of Farmington — and he has long been the subject of transfer rumors. Chandler was reflective in the postgame locker room Friday night, praising Pope and his UK teammates but declining to say much about his future.
His decision will be one to watch, but the Kentucky staff has been operating under the assumption that he will be back for another season in Lexington, and Chandler has said nothing to indicate he will be leaving the Wildcats.
If Pope can get all five of these players to return — and there seems to be a very good chance of that — it would obviously be a major coup in this transfer portal era, a tremendous turn for roster continuity and further testament to Pope’s vision for the UK program and how his players feel about him.
Transfer portal magic 2.0?
Not only did Pope and the UK coaching staff find a talented group of transfers for the 2024-25 season, they managed to make the pieces fit together on the court.
Over the past few months, when Kentucky has come up in conversations around college basketball, the question is whether the Cats’ coaches will be able to work that magic again.
Even if Oweh and the rest of the potential returnees come back to Kentucky, there will be some clear needs.
The Cats are looking for a defensive-minded point guard to replace Lamont Butler, the “heart and soul” of Pope’s first team. They’re also looking for a starter-level big man capable of playing on the perimeter. Another scorer — in the mold of Koby Brea — might also be incoming.
On the day Kentucky’s season ended, the Cats got the full feel of portal madness.
On Friday morning, UK landed a commitment from 6-foot-8 wing Kam Williams, a long and athletic perimeter player who hit 63 3-pointers at a 41.2% rate as a freshman at Tulane this season. That’s a start.
The day before, the Cats looked like the favorite to land point guard Donovan Dent, arguably the best backcourt player in the portal. While UK was playing Tennessee on Friday night, Dent committed to UCLA over Kentucky, a perfect example of how quickly things will move in the transfer portal this offseason.
Immediately, UNLV’s Dedan Thomas was viewed as a possible option to fill the spot. By Saturday, the UK staff was meeting with former Georgia guard Silas Demary Jr. The Zoom calls have already begun, and campus visits will start soon enough.
The coming days and weeks will bring a mad dash to fill rosters around the country. Nearly 1,500 players have jumped into the portal since it opened last Monday, and more are flowing in by the day. Expect to hear lots of names — some realistic, some not — linked to Kentucky, and the early indication is that Pope’s success with a totally new roster this season is playing well with transfers looking for a new home for the next one.
The Cats should have their pick of the litter. Making the pieces fit might be the bigger challenge.
Can Mark Pope find the chemistry?
As impressed as the basketball world was with Pope’s roster construction efforts in year one, it was the dynamic that showed up off the court that generated the most interesting conversation among outside observers.
It was apparent that these Cats clicked, difficult to do in the portal era and even more so when none of the 12 scholarship players had ever been teammates. A major part of the reason it worked was the fact that the locker room consisted of clear leaders and strong-willed players who weren’t afraid to follow.
“I think that starts with Coach Pope and the type of people that he’s looking for,” Andrew Carr said in the postgame locker room Friday night. “And then also just how much he emphasizes it and embraces it and encourages all of us to spend time together. And then you get a couple really great people who want to lead and try to bring everybody together. And then it becomes a whole lot easier, because you set standards — you set habits — early on, and that’s kind of what we were able to do. And then from there, it became more natural just to really spend time together — a whole lot more than most teams.”
Pope might be able to find players who can replicate the skill sets of guys like Brea, Butler and Carr — the three who joined him on the final postgame podium Friday night, imploring other transfers to follow in their footsteps — but it will be difficult to identify and successfully recruit players who can match their leadership and spirit of team unity.
Of the potential returnees expected to play major minutes next season, Oweh and Chandler possess leadership qualities and — like Jaxson Robinson did this past year — now have a history of playing under Pope, knowledge that can be passed to others.
By all accounts, incoming McDonald’s All-American big man Malachi Moreno — Kentucky’s Mr. Basketball and the Sweet 16 MVP over the weekend — has the personality to be a future leader of the Wildcats, but he’ll be a freshman next season, as will talented recruits Jasper Johnson and Acaden Lewis, more young players who will need someone to follow on and off the court.
Pope’s second Kentucky team should have plenty of talent. But to build on the thing that truly made his first group of Wildcats an instant success, Pope must find more like-minded, mature players to lead the program into another season.
A change in UK’s tactics?
Pope’s offense is pretty to watch — on most nights — and the Wildcats’ defense picked up by the end, but one glaring drawback to this Kentucky roster reared its ugly head on what turned out to be the final day of the season.
These Wildcats were plenty skilled — a necessity for the way Pope wants to play — but, collectively, they lacked a physicality that might be a requirement to find overwhelming success in the rough-and-tumble SEC.
Many times over the course of the season, the Cats were simply pushed around. The best (or, in their case, worst) example of that came Friday night, when the always physical Volunteers bullied Kentucky on the boards and knocked the Wildcats off their spots pretty much everywhere else on the court.
As a result of that physical play, which UK never really matched, Tennessee jumped out to an early double-digit lead and never looked back, controlling the game. The Cats lost 78-65, their lowest-scoring total of the season. They were outscored in second-chance points 19-5, a difference greater than the final scoring margin.
And it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Sometimes, UK would get bounced around and still find a way to win, but some of the Cats’ ugliest losses — Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama in the SEC Tournament — came when they simply couldn’t match up physically with their opponent.
Can Pope bring in some bigger, stronger, or simply more physical players while still keeping the level of skill needed to run his style and play what was more often than not a beautiful game on the court? Easier said than done.
The addition of Kam Williams — a long, athletic wing with legitimate NBA potential — looks like a move in the right direction. Oweh is obviously strong at getting to the rim. Garrison needs more seasoning, but his physicality will play in the SEC.
Pope needs more of it, however, and it will be interesting to see how much he finds.
Can Pope sustain the momentum?
Kentucky’s coach — a former captain of a national championship team — knows more than anyone that banners matter most when it comes to Kentucky basketball, but what UK managed to do in year one has to be viewed as a success, under the circumstances.
Pope took a program with no roster and managed to lead the Cats to the Sweet 16 for the first time in six years. Long before he coached his first game at his alma mater, he convinced the UK fan base that he was the right man for the job, bringing an understanding and positivity to the position that captured the imagination of a Big Blue Nation longing for the greatness of the past.
He understood the assignment, and he got Kentucky back on the right track.
Can Pope sustain that momentum?
By the time November rolls around — seven long months with no basketball games, no opportunities to make a good impression on the court — will fans be just as bought in as they were last April, when Pope filled Rupp Arena for a press conference and delivered with aplomb?
Kentucky’s new coach managed to engage large swaths of a fan base that felt disenfranchised by the previous regime, perhaps his most impressive feat over the past year. Folks around the commonwealth — and longtime supporters watching from afar — believed in his vision and followed his version of the Cats unlike they’d followed any UK basketball team in recent years.
That’s a difficult feeling to sustain. Keeping the momentum going will be difficult.
And, ultimately, Pope won’t have a whole lot of control over this particular situation. His natural inclination will be to continue to be a cheerleader for all things Kentucky basketball over the course of this offseason. That isn’t likely to change.
Will the fans who had checked out at the end of the John Calipari era and checked back in to see what Pope was cooking up for Kentucky basketball stick around for year two with the same fervor they brought to this past season? Will UK basketball remain the talk of the town in the summer months, and will Rupp Arena be packed to the rafters for those November games against the type of opponents that hadn’t drawn a full house in recent seasons?
The answers to those questions are out of Pope’s hands. This one will be up for the fans to decide.
This story was originally published March 31, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
