How are Jaland Lowe, Jayden Quaintance helping UK basketball from the sideline?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky basketball players Jaland Lowe and Jayden Quaintance are out injured for UK.
- Lowe is out for the season, while Quaintance has missed six straight games.
- Despite this, both players are still helping the Wildcats from the sideline.
Relative to expectations, two of Kentucky basketball’s top projected contributors haven’t factored much into the Wildcats’ on-court plans this season.
Junior point guard Jaland Lowe only made nine appearances for Mark Pope’s team before being ruled out for the remainder of the season with a right shoulder injury. Sophomore big man Jayden Quaintance — the top-rated player from UK’s offseason transfer class — has only played four times for Kentucky as he continues to manage swelling in his surgically repaired knee.
That’s not the ideal return from two players who were expected to be fixtures of the UK lineup by this point in the season.
Still, Pope and several UK players insist that Lowe and Quaintance have played a major part in the Cats’ current winning streak, which sits at five games ahead of Tuesday night’s matchup at No. 18 Vanderbilt.
Quaintance — a projected lottery pick in this summer’s NBA draft — had as impactful a freshman season as you’ll see last year. He averaged 9.4 points, 7.9 rebounds, 2.6 blocks, 1.5 assists and 1.1 steals per game at Arizona State during the 2024-25 season while being the youngest player in college basketball. A torn ACL brought that freshman campaign to an early end.
His results at Kentucky, aside from a stirring debut performance against St. John’s in December, haven’t matched that level. But, Quaintance has continued to use his basketball intellect to help UK.
“He gave us a pretty good scout on Tennessee and Texas,” freshman center Malachi Moreno said of the recent guidance he’s received from Quaintance.
“I think he’s a high-IQ player that’s going to really pick up the feel of how we play quickly,” Pope said last month of Quaintance prior to his debut with the Wildcats.
Quaintance will miss his sixth straight game for the Wildcats on Tuesday.
Lowe, who was a third-team All-ACC selection at Pittsburgh last season, continues to be a fixture of Kentucky’s game prep despite being sidelined.
“I think there’s so much that he can learn and grow (from). There’s so many ways he can grow right now. I think he can grow as a leader. I think his ceiling is to be an elite-level leader,” Pope said, adding that Lowe has taken on responsibilities as part of UK’s scouting operation. “I think he’s going to get a chance now to see this from the other side, from the schematic side, and from the communication side, in a new way that he’s never had a chance to see it.”
One of the Wildcats in the best position to receive advice from Lowe is senior guard Denzel Aberdeen, who has shifted over to the point guard spot due to Lowe’s absence. Aberdeen arrived at UK with plenty of experience, having made 39 appearances for Florida last season as part of a national championship-winning team.
Still, Aberdeen has benefitted in a big way from Lowe.
“He’s been a coach, even if he was playing or not,” Aberdeen said. “He’s a very good leader, very good person and especially helping me a lot. He’s always in my ear telling me what he sees and stuff like that.”
For Aberdeen, this goes all the way back to the first months of his relationship with Lowe, forged by summer practice battles inside the Joe Craft Center.
“Every little thing I’ve seen him do in practice, I feel like I can implement in my game,” Aberdeen said. “... Anything he sees, I know it’s going to work because he’s a very good guard. So I just try to do that in the game.”
Sophomore guard Collin Chandler also sung the praises of Lowe, who was absent from his usual spot on Kentucky’s bench for Saturday’s home win over Ole Miss. Pope said Lowe was away from the team while he prepped for surgery on his injured right shoulder.
“He’s like another coach. Very smart basketball player, he sees things. He’s also very vocal,” Chandler said. “That’s an underrated thing about J-Lowe, he’s very vocal and not afraid to talk and help us out.”
In an ideal world, Quaintance will return to the Kentucky rotation sooner rather than later, and Lowe will continue to hone his leadership skills while recovering from the right shoulder injury that has derailed his junior season.
That’s the optimal outcome for the Wildcats, who will likely be down to just nine available scholarship players again for Tuesday’s tilt at Vandy.
“If he does this right, then this is going to change his basketball career,” Pope said of Lowe. “The education he’s able to get now, there’s no other way he would get this... I expect him to dig in, and I expect him to come out as a different human being, to think about the game different, think about how he communicates with his teammates different, to think about how to unify a group different.”
