Will Braydon Hawthorne burn his redshirt to play for Kentucky this season?
The more players that this Kentucky basketball team loses, the louder the speculation has been.
Will celebrated practice player Braydon Hawthorne burn his redshirt and actually play for the Wildcats this season? UK coach Mark Pope isn’t ruling it out.
“It’s something that is certainly (being discussed),” Pope said after Kentucky’s 72-63 win over Ole Miss on Saturday afternoon. “There’s so many dynamics there. Most importantly, right now, he’s not healthy. So we can’t burn the redshirt now, because he’s not healthy. But certainly he is an incredibly talented player that could really help us down the road.
“We’ll see. We’ll see. He’s got to get healthy first.”
Pope later said that Hawthorne has been dealing with a calf issue, though the freshman was on the Rupp Arena court to go through some light warmups Saturday morning. The Herald-Leader was also told that he participated in Friday’s practice as part of UK’s second unit — instead of his typical spot on the scout team — and was moving around the court well in that session.
Interest in Hawthorne has hit a new high in recent days as Pope continues to deal with injury issues across his roster.
Junior point guard Jaland Lowe is out for the season with a shoulder injury. Sophomore forward Jayden Quaintance — a projected NBA lottery pick — missed his fifth consecutive game Saturday due to knee issues. And fellow sophomore Kam Williams underwent surgery for a broken foot Friday, said Pope, who has not officially ruled Williams out for the season but has acknowledged that he will be sidelined for “a while” with the injury.
Lowe, Quaintance and Williams have all started games for the Cats this season, and their ailments have left Pope with only nine scholarship-level players at his disposal.
On Saturday, sophomore guard Collin Chandler took Williams’ spot in the starting five alongside Denzel Aberdeen, Otega Oweh, Andrija Jelavic and Malachi Moreno. That left only Jasper Johnson, Trent Noah, Mouhamed Dioubate and Brandon Garrison off the bench.
All nine of those Wildcats played double-digit minutes in the victory over the Rebels.
Hawthorne — a 6-foot-8, perimeter-oriented player from Beckley, West Virginia — rocketed up the recruiting rankings at the end of the 2025 cycle. He finished as the No. 33 overall prospect in the final 247Sports rankings for that group, and he came to UK as the subject of long-term NBA draft buzz.
Weighing just 170 pounds at the beginning of the season, Hawthorne has spent the past several months trying to add strength to his thin frame while also playing a key role for the Wildcats on practice days.
Word of his promising performances in those practices has spread beyond the Joe Craft Center, and his regular pregame routine on game days has drawn attention, too, with Hawthorne showing off fluid movements and impressive shooting range on the Rupp Arena court.
“He’s a killer, man,” Aberdeen said Friday. “Each and every day in practice, he’s always giving us buckets. … He’s very good. Very high ceiling. He’s a knockdown shooter. He can handle the ball. He’s a very lengthy defender. Always gets blocks and steals.”
Moreno, one of Hawthorne’s fellow freshmen, agreed.
“He’s always coming to work,” he said. “Anything the coaches ask him to do, he’s willing to do it. And he’s willing to make everybody around him better. And I think that’s something that we’ve really needed over the last couple of weeks, as we’ve kind of come into conference play with the new (rotation), and just finding where everybody fits. He’s kind of taken on that role of just making sure everybody’s ready to go and making sure that everybody’s prepared for what’s to come.”
What about Hawthorne’s upside once he makes his debut in an actual game?
“He’s gonna be a star,” Moreno said. “We all saw it in high school. And, I mean, that’s Braydon Hawthorne. And I think he’s an NBA guy. So that’s as high as you can go.”
Whether that debut comes in the next few weeks or the start of next season remains to be seen.
The current rules around basketball redshirts are not the same as in college football, where players are allowed to appear in up to four regular-season games without using a season of eligibility. In basketball, if a player appears in just one game — barring an injury that falls within certain parameters — that player won’t be able to get that year of eligibility back.
Hawthorne, 19, projects as a potential NBA draft pick in fewer than four seasons, but Pope has also talked about the difficulty he would face with jumping into competitive play this late in the season. The UK coach has also touted the benefit of concentrating on development at this stage in Hawthorne’s young career.
“He is a really, really, really terrific young talent,” Pope said earlier this season. “And he has an incredibly bright future. He also, right now, needs to grow. Like, there’s so much growth in him. And the advantage of redshirting is that he gets to be solely, uniquely focused on developing. He doesn’t have the distractions of a game twice a week, where he’s altering his workout program or his preparation or anything else.”
But Pope said that before his roster was whittled down to nine available players following Williams’ injury. And even as he’s talked about the benefit that comes with Hawthorne being able to focus fully on his development, he’s said that minutes in actual games can lead to growth, too.
Oweh, who led the Cats with 23 points Saturday, said after the game that Hawthorne could help UK immediately but that he and his teammates would not pressure him into any decision.
“We all want to play with Braydon,” Oweh said. “We all know what he’s capable of. It’s just the best decision for him, whatever he decides. But he could help us in a bunch of ways, for sure. But, whatever he decides, we’re 100% behind him.”
Whatever that decision turns out to be, Oweh sees a bright future for his young teammate.
“He’s still so fresh that you could tell him the things that are going to help him, and he’s going to go out there and do it the next play,” he said. “And it’s just stuff like that — that’s just how you continue to get better. He really receives information well and then puts it in the game — or in practice, in this situation — really well.
“He’s a great team guy. And on top of that, he’s a scorer — as a 6-9 guard.”
That scoring ability — and especially his talent as a 3-point shooter — could be a boost to the Cats, who went 18 for 50 from the field and 8 for 27 from long range in Saturday’s win. Kentucky has shot better than 47.5% in just one of its seven SEC games so far.
Moreno also said that teammates won’t be pushing Hawthorne in any specific direction, though he says the possibility of burning the redshirt has come up outside of conversations with the coaching staff.
“I think some people have definitely said it to him once or twice, but, at the end of the day, that’s his decision,” Moreno said. “And he talks with the coaches about it every day, so I think it all just comes down to if he wants to do it or not.”
This story was originally published January 24, 2026 at 2:57 PM.
