Who will get the fifth starting spot for Kentucky basketball this season?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky’s probable starting lineup features Lowe, Oweh, Dioubate and likely Garrison.
- Denzel Aberdeen leads fifth starter candidates but may serve as Lowe’s backup.
- Chandler, Johnson, Williams and Jelavic offer depth and varied skill sets off bench.
The start of fall practice is still three weeks away, but the starting lineup for Mark Pope’s second Kentucky basketball team appears to be nearly set.
Jaland Lowe was one of Pope’s prized offseason acquisitions, a top point guard in the transfer portal whom new teammates talked up all summer as the “PG1” on UK’s 2025-26 squad. Pope has done nothing to dissuade that talk. Lowe will be a Kentucky starter.
Otega Oweh was UK’s leading scorer last season and goes into this one as a top contender for SEC preseason player of the year honors. He’s starting.
Mouhamed Dioubate — a role player at Alabama the past two years — was another key transfer addition for the UK staff and has been the subject of effusive praise from all corners of the program since the team arrived on campus in June. He’s a versatile, high-upside forward and a seemingly perfect fit for how Pope wants his second Kentucky team to play. He’ll almost certainly start.
And UK’s head coach has some enticing options at the 5 spot, led by projected NBA lottery pick Jayden Quaintance and returning big man Brandon Garrison, the backup center on last season’s team. It’s a near-lock that one of these two will be in the UK starting lineup for the opener against Nicholls on Nov. 4 and beyond.
With Quaintance still recovering from knee surgery, expect Garrison to be the starting 5 for the first few games, at least, before Pope is forced to make a difficult decision at that position.
That’s four starting lineup spots basically spoken for, two months before the first game is played.
The question of who gets the fifth and final one on a UK team expected to be incredibly deep — with several players projected to get meaningful minutes off the bench — might not seem like a huge deal.
But these are obviously the players setting the tone on game nights, and with high-profile matchups against Louisville and Michigan State in the first couple of weeks of the season — and more marquee opponents to follow soon after — who starts will be important.
And Pope showed last season that he’ll stick with a starting five for as long as he can.
The quintet of Lamont Butler, Jaxson Robinson, Oweh, Andrew Carr and Amari Williams started the first eight games of the season before Butler suffered an ankle injury at Clemson. He sat out the following two games, then that same five started the next eight games on the schedule, before injuries to Butler, Carr and Robinson wreaked havoc on Pope’s preferred lineup.
That lineup made one more collective start together at Oklahoma — in Robinson’s last game of the season — and went 13-4 as a group, with victories over Florida (the eventual national champion), Duke (a Final Four participant) and archrival Louisville among the highlights.
There’s a good chance that whoever emerges as a starter between now and Nov. 4 will hear his name called in pregame introductions for as long as he’s healthy. Who will that Wildcat be?
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Denzel Aberdeen
The most common offseason prediction to fill Kentucky’s fifth starting spot has been the most logical choice: Denzel Aberdeen, who won a national title at Florida last season and will be one of only two seniors playing meaningful minutes for the Wildcats. (Oweh is the other.)
National pundits like Aberdeen as a starter in a three-guard lineup at UK this season, and for good reason. The 6-foot-5 college basketball veteran can play on or off the ball and should impact the game on both sides of the court. His length and athleticism could pair well with Oweh defensively. He’d be one more shot creator who has also shown an ability to make long-range shots (35% on 3-pointers in each of the past two seasons).
In five starts last season — the only five starts of his three-year career at Florida — Aberdeen averaged 14.4 points, with 2.6 assists and just 0.8 turnovers in 29.8 minutes per game, shooting 12 for 29 from 3-point range (41.4%) while helping lead the Gators to victories in all five games, four of which came against NCAA Tournament teams (including a win at eventual SEC champ Auburn).
That’s a pretty strong case.
One counterargument to Aberdeen’s status as the apparent frontrunner for a starting spot: he’s also likely to be the primary backup to Lowe at point guard. If both of those players start, Pope might have to get tricky with substitution patterns very early in the game to ensure at least one of them would be on the court at any given time.
The point guard rotation ended up being a major headache for the UK coach last season, due to the injuries to Butler, Robinson and Kerr Kriisa, and Pope also made it clear early in the campaign that he wouldn’t play Butler and Kriisa at the same time, despite both playmakers having considerably different skill sets and ample starting experience at a high level.
Maybe Aberdeen as a starter is the easy answer here. But perhaps Pope decides he’d rather save the veteran guard for his second wave?
Collin Chandler
Even with the uncertainty of his situation leading to fairly low expectations this time last year, Collin Chandler’s first season as a Wildcat was a bit of a letdown to many fans.
Chandler — an All-American-level recruit in the 2022 class — spent the two years before arriving in Lexington on a Mormon mission. He barely touched a basketball during that time, and he understandably showed up at UK last summer out of game shape and well below form.
Despite some minor training-camp injuries derailing his timeline to get up to speed, Chandler did see some meaningful minutes early in the season. But that fell off once SEC play began. Over one four-week period encompassing most of January, he played a total of five minutes in just two games — missing four other contests completely — with zero points in that stretch.
And then, with injuries mounting elsewhere on the roster, he broke through.
Chandler ended up playing double-digit minutes in each of Kentucky’s final eight games, including all five in the postseason. He went 11 for 22 from 3-point range in that stretch and made some big shots in both of UK’s NCAA Tournament victories. (Chandler was 5 for 8 from deep during the NCAA tourney.)
He said immediately after the 2024-25 season that he would be working toward much bigger things in year two, and, according to the word that came out of the Joe Craft Center this summer, he’s continuing to build on the promise shown at the end of last season.
Chandler has also been mentioned as a possible backup point guard by Pope, and he can obviously be a 3-point threat in high-stress situations. He’s an athletic player who showed off his great feel for the game once everything slowed down for him toward the end of his freshman year.
And keep in mind that Chandler, who had a reputation for being mature for his age in high school, will be a 22-year-old sophomore by the end of this season.
There’s a good chance he emerges as a UK starter before his career as a Wildcat is finished, and there’s a case to be made that — if he keeps progressing at his current rate — Chandler might be worthy of such a spot by this winter.
Jasper Johnson
If Pope does indeed go with a three-guard lineup to start off games, there’s not much doubt about who the highest-upside possibility would be alongside Lowe and Oweh.
Jasper Johnson has been viewed as a five-star-caliber recruit for years, and — at No. 21 in the final 247Sports composite rankings for 2025 — he’s the most highly rated prospect that Pope has ever pulled straight out of high school.
The 6-4 freshman is another player whom Pope has publicly mentioned as a possible backup point guard, but his greatest contributions as a Wildcat will surely come as a scorer. Johnson can put up points in a hurry, and that’s expected to be true even as a freshman on a team filled with experienced contributors across the positional spectrum.
The Lexington native was touted as one of the most explosive offensive players in his recruiting class. Once he gets the hang of Pope’s system, he should regularly put himself in a position to keep defenders on their toes, leading to scoring opportunities for himself and others.
It was a common occurrence last season for Oweh — the youngest player in UK’s starting lineup — to go off for two or three baskets in a short amount of time, sparking his teammates in the process. Johnson has the potential to be even more of a microwave scorer.
His defense has been called into question — not uncommon for a young, offensively gifted guard — and that, along with the natural growing pains that will come with adapting to the college game, could hurt his case for a spot in the starting lineup.
If Pope does go with a more veteran player in his first five, expect to see Johnson plenty off the bench. His general shiftiness and scoring burst could also be quite the change of pace in an early sub role — think about what Rob Dillingham did for the Cats two seasons ago — and that might be where Pope decides he’ll be best suited for this team.
Johnson hasn’t been shy about his one-and-done aspirations. It’s worth noting that Pope’s first-ever NBA Draft pick, Koby Brea, was not a starter when everyone on last season’s team was healthy. It’s also worth noting that Brea performed well when thrust into a starting role.
Johnson, though a few years younger, could be in a similar spot.
Kam Williams
If Pope doesn’t want to go the three-guard route, Kam Williams might be his best bet.
Williams would check an awful lot of boxes for a team that often lacked the combination of length, athleticism and physicality that was clearly needed to jump into the very top tier of the SEC last season.
Though he’s not the biggest wing — listed at 6-8 and 190 pounds — Williams has immense athleticism and a 7-foot wingspan, giving him plenty of length for the 3 spot. Pope has talked up his defensive and rebounding abilities since summer practice ended last month, and those were two key areas of lament from the UK coach as last season progressed.
Meanwhile, Williams has boasted about his own offensive game. He’s already declared himself the best 3-point shooter on this team, and the numbers go a long way toward backing him up. As a freshman at Tulane, he connected on 63 3-pointers — more than any other player on this Kentucky roster made last season — and hit at a 41.2% rate.
Similar to Johnson, it’s possible that Pope might prefer this kind of skill set as part of a second wave off the bench, an opportunity to throw a different look at the opponent.
But Williams’ 3-and-D ability might be better suited between Oweh and Dioubate in UK’s starting five, giving the Cats more length and rebounding ability than they’d get elsewhere. Pope would sacrifice some off-the-dribble creation by going with Williams over one of the aforementioned guards, but he certainly wouldn’t lose anything from a perimeter shooting perspective.
Unlike the other projected starters for the Wildcats — plus Aberdeen and Chandler — Williams will be making the jump from mid-major to the heights of college competition. That adjustment might be too steep to install the 19-year-old as a starter right off the bat, but if Williams proves ready to make the transition, he should be a dynamic player for Kentucky, with the ability to impact the game on both sides of the court.
He’s already being projected as an NBA draft pick in 2026. That’s the type of potential he could bring to UK’s starting lineup.
Andrija Jelavic
The real wild card in this conversation is Andrija Jelavic, a 6-11 forward from Croatia with all-over-the-court skills and considerable upside.
While fellow UK bigs Quaintance, Garrison and Malachi Moreno all seem much better suited for the 5 spot — making it unlikely that any two players from that trio will spend much time on the floor together — Jelavic is viewed as more of a perimeter-oriented forward who could thrive in Pope’s system and play alongside any of those post players.
Jelavic, who turned 21 years old in May, has been talked about in the past as a potential NBA draft pick, and he already has two years of pro experience in Europe. A starting lineup prediction from The Athletic posted over the summer actually included Jelavic in Pope’s first five. That projection had him in place of Dioubate, a seemingly unlikely scenario given the preseason hype around the Alabama transfer, but it was yet another indication of Jelavic’s potential.
In 53 Adriatic League appearances over the past two years, Jelavic averaged 10.6 points and 7.5 rebounds in 29.7 minutes per game. His 3-point hit rate increased from 28.7% in 2023-24 to 32.1% this past season — with a total of 52 made 3-pointers in those 53 games — and the expectation is that he’ll be an outside shooting threat for the Cats.
How exactly will all of that translate to the highest level of college basketball? That’s unclear, and it’s what makes Jelavic such an unknown.
He missed all of UK’s eight-week summer session while wrapping up academic obligations back home, and that will put him behind the rest of the Wildcats when formal preseason practices begin later this month.
From there, he’ll have about four weeks to catch up before Kentucky’s first exhibition game — against possible preseason No. 1 Purdue — and just six weeks until his college basketball debut.
Emerging as a starter-level player for a team with realistic national championship hopes in such a short amount of time will be a huge ask, but there’s real talent here.
Enough to earn major minutes right off the bat? Time will tell.
