Five reasons there’s still hope for Mark Pope and this Kentucky basketball team
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Jaland Lowe’s return should create transition chances and open 3s for teammates.
- Jayden Quaintance’s impending return would add rim protection and physicality.
- Mo Dioubate’s defense changed tempo; healthier roster gives Pope time to adapt.
Six weeks ago, the sky was the limit for Mark Pope’s basketball team.
By the time last week began, the sky was falling on fans of the Kentucky Wildcats.
It doesn’t take long for narratives to shift in the college sports world these days, and the outlook on Pope and the Cats took a drastic turn as soon as the difficult games arrived.
Losses to Louisville, Michigan State, North Carolina and Gonzaga knocked UK — the No. 9 team in the country and a legitimate national title contender when the season began — out of the Top 25 completely. The run of subpar results also knocked Pope down a peg or three in the eyes of some Kentucky fans.
The Cats were circling the wagons by the time their first big win of the season finally came — a 72-60 victory over Indiana in Rupp Arena on Saturday night — but even that performance was difficult to watch, not likely to change the minds of those who questioned whether this team would have what it takes to make a serious run in March.
The win over the Hoosiers wasn’t pretty, but there were glimpses of what these Wildcats might become amid the ugliness, and the circumstances surrounding Pope’s second UK team leave plenty of room for optimism for anyone looking to find it.
With another big game coming up — Kentucky vs. Rick Pitino and No. 22 St. John’s at 12:30 p.m. ET Saturday in Atlanta — here are five reasons fans of the Wildcats can still hope for a special season.
Jaland Lowe is legit
This season hasn’t gone the way Jaland Lowe expected. The Pittsburgh transfer came to Kentucky expecting to be the leader — and offensive engine — of a team with seemingly realistic national title hopes.
Instead, he suffered a right shoulder injury during UK’s Blue-White Game in October that sidelined him for the rest of the preseason — plus the Cats’ two exhibition games and their regular-season opener — before reinjuring the shoulder in practice two days after playing a still-season-high 30 minutes off the bench in the loss to Louisville.
Lowe returned in the 35-point blowout against Gonzaga — going 0 for 5 from the floor that night — and played just eight minutes in a win over North Carolina Central four days later. His performance Saturday — 13 points against Indiana — was his best as a Wildcat so far, and he showed flashes of what he might be able to do for this Kentucky team.
No one on UK’s roster can carve up a defense off the dribble like Lowe, a shifty, 6-foot-1 point guard whose quickness is a weapon all over the court.
These Cats want to live in transition, and they haven’t been able to do that against good teams. Lowe should help them there. Kentucky’s halfcourt offense has often been stagnant in its biggest games, with no spacing and little flow leading to bad looks, contested shots and turnovers. Lowe should be able to discombobulate the defense and get his teammates better scoring opportunities.
UK’s best offensive performance in its five games against high-major competition came at Louisville, where Lowe played a season high in minutes. Even in that debacle against Gonzaga, he was able to generate open looks. And while Lowe was obviously still rusty for the Indiana game, his quickness was on display, and his shots finally dropped toward the end, helping the Cats clinch their first big win of the season.
UK’s offense won’t function as smoothly this season as it did in Pope’s first year on the job, but if Lowe can stay healthy, his presence should open more opportunities for SEC preseason player of the year Otega Oweh, as well as cleaner looks from beyond the arc for a Kentucky team that has struggled mightily from deep against good competition.
UK’s 3-point shooting improves
Speaking of that 3-point shooting … surely it can’t get much worse against quality teams.
In Kentucky’s six games against overmatched competition, it’s shooting 38.6% from long range, with an average of 10.7 makes per game. In those four losses to ranked teams plus the win over Indiana, the Wildcats are shooting just 23.8% from deep. Over the past three such games — the losses to Gonzaga, UNC and the win over IU — they’re 11 for 62 (17.7%).
Kentucky has just one cupcake left — Bellarmine in Rupp on Tuesday afternoon — and 18 SEC games plus St. John’s otherwise. If the Cats continue to shoot like this against those quality teams, they’re going nowhere.
But they can’t really be this bad, can they?
As Lowe settles in, his ability to create in the halfcourt offense should lead to more open 3-pointers than the Cats have been getting without him. His ability to get UK going in transition should also lead to better perimeter looks on the run.
Kam Williams is also due for a long-range turnaround. The sophomore guard made 63 3-pointers as a freshman at Tulane last season — no other current Cat hit more in the 2024-25 campaign — and shot at a 41.3% clip. So far this season, he’s 7 for 33 (21.2%).
Williams was benched in the first half of the win over North Carolina Central last week as Pope challenged him to bring more intensity to the court, and the UK coach said he responded with his best practice as a Wildcat the next time out. If he can stay on the floor, he should emerge as more of a shooting threat.
Lowe’s ability to draw in defenses should also help get better looks for Denzel Aberdeen, who will play more of an off-ball role as long as Lowe is on the court.
UK’s offense hasn’t looked good so far, but much of this season’s approach was built with Lowe leading it in mind, and his absence to this point makes it unfair to fully judge just yet.
Jayden Quaintance returns
The wild card on this Wildcats’ roster might be getting closer to a return. And that could truly be a game-changer for the Cats.
Jayden Quaintance is Kentucky’s top-rated NBA prospect by a wide margin. He’s a projected lottery pick in the 2026 draft and a possible top-five talent, a 6-10, 255-pound ball of athleticism and physicality in the frontcourt.
Quaintance is also just nine months removed from surgery for a torn ACL, but Pope recently started talking in terms of actual time for his potential UK debut, saying Friday that he hopes to have him on the court during games sometime in “the next month or so,” adding he was possibly “days and weeks” away from playing. It’s no longer a matter of “months,” Pope made clear.
Barring any setbacks, it sounds like Quaintance could be playing in the early portion of the SEC schedule — potentially even earlier than that — and just having him on the floor would lead opposing teams to look at these Wildcats differently.
His presence as a rim-protector — he ranked fifth nationally among high-major players in block percentage as a 17-year-old freshman at Arizona State last season — would have drivers thinking twice about taking it to the rim. His physicality should help the Cats in other areas defensively as well as on the boards, especially as they attempt to play a more “bully ball” style than last season.
While limited offensively, he is capable of cutting to the rim and even creating for himself — a powerful, jump-out-of-the-gym talent that defenses will have to account for at all times.
Quaintance will need time to mentally adjust to playing on that knee, but if by the end of the season he can match his impact from last season — even if it comes in fewer minutes — this should be a much more dangerous Kentucky team with him on the court.
Kentucky picks up the defense
Pope’s roster has been ravaged by injuries to key players. Perhaps nowhere has that hurt more than on defense, a unit the UK coach specifically set out to improve with his transfer portal decisions last spring.
One key piece to that puzzle was supposed to be Mouhamed Dioubate, who suffered an ankle injury toward the end of the loss to Michigan State that sidelined him for another five games before he made his return against Indiana over the weekend.
Dioubate ended up as the star of that IU game, leading the Cats with 14 points, 12 rebounds and five steals, throwing his body around on the offensive boards — he had seven of those — and just generally disrupting what the Hoosiers wanted to do.
It’s no coincidence that UK turned in its best defensive performance of the season, by far, against a quality team in that victory. The Cats held IU to only 21 points in the second half Saturday night. Dioubate helped lead a 17-2 run in that period that turned the game around.
Kentucky’s two worst defensive performances, according to the metrics, came against Gonzaga and North Carolina Central, while Dioubate was out, and the Cats certainly look different with him on the court. UK is allowing 92.5 points per 100 possessions overall but 86.3 with Dioubate on the floor, according to Sports Reference College Basketball.
“Mo is a big bully, man,” Jaland Lowe said after the win over IU. “We need a big bully on our team. … That feeds off onto everybody else. It fed off to me. I wanted to play even harder defense. I wanted to get a couple rebounds in there, just because he was fighting in there. It spread off to (Brandon Garrison). BG was fighting — guarding multiple positions — doing everything he could to be there for us.
“And it just spread all throughout the team, no matter who came in at what time. It set the tone for everybody.”
While Lowe isn’t known as a lockdown defender, he can be a pest on the perimeter. Getting Dioubate and Lowe in the lineup can open defensive opportunities for guys like Oweh and Aberdeen. And when Quaintance comes back, it’s possible that this UK “D” could transform into what Pope was envisioning when he put this team together.
That’s not going to happen overnight. These guys will still need to work on their communication and learn each other as defenders before they can hit their collective ceiling, but having Dioubate, Quaintance and even Lowe at his disposal can only bring better results for Pope moving forward.
Mark Pope figures it out
Dan Issel — the Wildcats’ all-time leader in scoring and rebounding, as well as a former NBA head coach and general manager — is known for shooting it straight when it comes to his alma mater. He had plenty of constructive criticism for the Cats after their loss to Gonzaga.
One thing that Issel made clear while talking about Mark Pope’s struggles last week? “I mean, he didn’t forget how to coach over the summer,” the UK basketball great said.
Before a vocal segment of Kentucky fans turned on Pope in the past few weeks, he was adored throughout the fan base for his ability to talk ball, with demonstrated results in year one on this job and previous stops at BYU and Utah Valley.
UK has struggled to start this season, sure, but it doesn’t mean Pope can’t coach. It is clear that he hasn’t quite figured out how best to approach this particular roster, and — while he’s the man responsible for putting it together — that shouldn’t come as a major surprise.
While talking in the preseason about why Pope’s teams have never been great at generating turnovers, UK assistant coach Cody Fueger — a Pope staff member for all 11 of his seasons as a head coach — said they’d simply never had a roster like this one.
“I just think this is our best-built roster for that type of defense,” he told the Herald-Leader.
That leads to a larger point: Pope has never coached a group like this, period. His first UK team — like the end of his BYU run — was known for finesse. It was beautiful offensive basketball that often lacked physicality at the other end. Pope coached those teams very well.
Not only has this season been a learning experience for the players on the court, it’s been a learning curve for Pope, who is clearly still trying to figure out how to best put these pieces together on game days. (The injuries to prominent players haven’t helped.)
The good news for Pope — and those who want to see him succeed — is that there’s still quite a bit of time to make it work. Going by the current AP Top 25, the Wildcats will have 11 more games against ranked teams, plus several additional matchups that would look good on an NCAA Tournament résumé.
If returning players can stay on the court, UK should improve on both sides of the ball. And it’s certainly possible that Pope can find ways to get more out of clearly talented players like Jasper Johnson and Williams, a couple of Cats who have largely struggled to this point.
“I know, individually, we’re great,” Oweh said last week, a few days before the Indiana game. “It’s a matter of just us playing together. I feel like, once we get one, we’re about to start rolling. And on top of that, it’s still early. Like, we still got three months left.”
