Andrija Jelavic wasn’t perfect, but he performed in first UK basketball start
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UK basketball forward Andrija Jelavic played well in his first start for the Wildcats.
- Jelavic had 11 points and five rebounds in 21 minutes during Kentucky’s win at LSU.
- Jelavic is only the second Kentucky basketball player from Croatia in program history.
Long before Kentucky basketball turned things around in the second half to storm to a comeback win Wednesday night at LSU, Mark Pope shook things up for the Wildcats.
In fact, he did so right from the opening tip.
With sophomore big and likely NBA draft lottery pick Jayden Quaintance still out injured, Pope gave a first college start to Andrija Jelavic, UK’s 6-foot-11 forward from Croatia.
Jelavic — who is playing his first season of college basketball but is classified as a sophomore by the NCAA — largely performed well for Pope in what became a buzzer-beating 75-74 victory for the Wildcats.
In 21 productive minutes, Jelavic tallied 11 points and five rebounds while knocking down a pair of 3-pointers and making 4 of 7 shots from the field. Jelavic’s six first-half points were about the only bright spot of the opening 20 minutes for the Cats.
For the entire game, Jelavic’s plus-minus rating of plus-8 was the second-best on the UK team, behind only freshman Malachi Moreno, who made the game-winning shot.
“I thought he was good,” Pope said Wednesday night of Jelavic. “He made a couple shots for us, which was important.”
When speaking with reporters Friday morning, Jelavic said he’s made the most progress with his on-court physicality since arriving to play college basketball this offseason after a two-year professional playing career in Europe.
“I think I got more physical. Of course, it’s not even near where it needs to be,” Jelavic said. “But yeah, I’m working on my physicality, as well as my contribution on the defensive end.”
Jelavic hadn’t played in three of UK’s previous six games entering Wednesday night. Still, neither Jelavic, nor Pope, had given up hope that Jelavic could be impactful.
“He can shoot the ball. He hasn’t shot it well in limited opportunities this year, but he can really shoot it,” Pope said on UK’s pregame radio show Wednesday. “At some point that’s going to really translate for him. He’s got a unique physicality to him, and he’s a pretty high IQ guy. He can help us in a lot of different ways.”
“I knew that even when I was not playing, I knew that it’s not because I’m a bad player. It’s just because the situation is like that,” Jelavic added. “Maybe some other players stepped up in that moment. We won some games and coach didn’t want to change the winning roster that was currently playing... I knew my chance was going to come and I was going to take it.”
Jelavic faced a similar situation during his second and final professional season in Europe, while playing for Mega MIS in Serbia.
“I had an injury. I broke the little finger on my hand and I was out for like a month,” Jelavic recalled. “When I came back in, some other players had good games at my positions and they were in the starting lineup and my minutes started to drop and everything. But, as I said, even then I kept believing in myself and came back to the starting lineup by the second half of the season. It’s a familiar situation I’ve been in.”
Specifically, Pope has stressed the importance of Jelavic’s rebounding ability when he does get playing time.
“His impact on the glass is important. That’s a place where he’s never been great, and so his presence on the glass is really, really important,” Pope said. “His decision-making, in terms of protecting the ball but still being a playmaker, is really, really important. His communication is important. He’s got a good sense of kind of where to be and when to be and how to be, for the most part. He can make adjustments when he misses an assignment, but his willingness to be communicative to his teammates is also really important.”
A sequence that encapsulated of all this came right from the jump against LSU.
The Tigers’ first offensive possession of the night resulted in two offensive rebounds and three total shot attempts. Jelavic was in the vicinity of both those rebounds, and he was clearly responsible for allowing the first offensive board. Eventually, Jelavic caught an errant shot when the ball went near him for a third time on that opening possession.
At the other end, Jelavic had UK’s first three points of the game and six of the Wildcats’ first nine. Remarkably, Jelavic was the only Kentucky player to make a shot from the field — he converted on a layup and a 3-pointer from near the top of the key — during the first 12 minutes of the game as LSU built a 12-point lead.
“It felt really great,” Jelavic, a 26.5% 3-point shooter this season, said of getting shots to fall. “... I feel really confident in my shot and I think it will be able to drop.”
Just about everybody in the blue and white bore responsibility for the situation Kentucky found itself in, trailing LSU — still the only winless team in SEC play — by 18 points with less than 19 minutes to play.
But, like several of his teammates, Jelavic did his part to help the Wildcats climb out of that hole. He was on the floor for the first 11 minutes of the second half as UK clawed back to within five points.
According to Jelavic, there was no panic in Kentucky’s locker room despite the Wildcats facing a 16-point deficit at the break.
“In the first half I was like, these guys are so not better than us,” Jelavic said of the Tigers. “... I even think the conversation at halftime was not like, there was no nervousness, there was no anger. There was just like ‘What are we doing wrong? And how can we operate to win this game?’”
While Jelavic wasn’t on the court for the stretch run of Kentucky’s comeback, Pope put him back into the game for the final play, when Collin Chandler’s lengthy inbound pass found Moreno for an iconic buzzer-beating moment.
“Conceptually, I thought he was pretty solid,” Pope said postgame, before adding that he felt Jelavic’s defensive performance improved when UK began switching in the second half. “... (Jelavic) managed that really well, as did the rest of our guys. Especially the switch on the back end, I thought he was really good.”
Jelavic’s spot in the UK starting lineup — and his playing time in general — likely will hinge on the health of Quaintance, who has been dealing with swelling in his surgically repaired knee and has only appeared in four games this season.
But, Pope continues to insist that Jelavic’s best basketball is ahead of him. The Croatian showed enough against LSU to indicate Pope may be on the right track.
“I was proud of him tonight,” Pope said. “He got thrown into the starting lineup, and into a complicated energy first half. Like Jela is, (he) just kept coming and coming and coming. I thought he gave us a great effort.”
This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 6:00 AM.
