Mark Pope says fatigue is a problem for UK basketball. What can be done to help?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky basketball has been down to only nine healthy scholarship players since Jan. 21.
- This has led to fatigue issues for the Wildcats, according to Mark Pope.
- UK has been without Jaland Lowe, Jayden Quaintance and Kam Williams for the past 12 games.
In recent weeks, talk of player fatigue has dominated the Kentucky basketball discourse.
Mark Pope has often used the word when discussing the current state of play for his UK Cats, who open the SEC Tournament on Wednesday afternoon in Nashville, Tennessee.
UK has been down to only nine healthy scholarship players for the past 12 games. Junior guard Jaland Lowe is done for the season due to right shoulder injuries. Sophomore big Jayden Quaintance continues to deal with knee swelling issues. Sophomore wing Kam Williams broke his left foot Jan. 21, although he could return soon.
Those injuries — combined with redshirt seasons for freshman forward Braydon Hawthorne and junior forward Reece Potter — have limited Pope’s playing options over the past seven weeks.
While the Kentucky coach usually provides an addendum that this limited roster isn’t the reason for UK’s performances, Pope has frequently referenced the fatigue that his players are dealing with, and the challenges that come with it.
When 9 seed Kentucky begins postseason play Wednesday against 16 seed LSU in the first round of the SEC Tournament, three players in particular will be top of mind when it comes to their on-court minutes.
Since Jan. 21, guards Otega Oweh, Denzel Aberdeen and Collin Chandler have each shouldered a massive minutes load. Oweh is averaging 35.2 minutes per game over the past 12 contests. Aberdeen (33.2) and Chandler (31.3) aren’t far behind.
“Our guys’ load has been really high,” Pope said Monday on his weekly radio show. “When you’re approaching this — 34, 36, 38 minutes — it gets high, and the duress that they’re under is a lot.”
Over the past 12 games, the next-most-used UK player is freshman center Malachi Moreno, who has played 82 fewer minutes than Chandler and is averaging 24.4 minutes. That’s nearly seven minutes less than Chandler’s average.
Still, Pope cited the 19-year-old Moreno when discussing the pitfalls of playing too many minutes.
“Malachi Moreno is one of the best-conditioned seven-footers in the country. He can run for days,” Pope said. “But just the physical beating that he takes on the court. At some point, you just get a little out of breath and a little leg weary, and you function better when you can have a little blow. That’s the point of having a team.”
Forwards Mo Dioubate (22.0 minutes), Andrija Jelavic (16.8) and Brandon Garrison (15.6) round out UK’s top minutes contributors since Jan. 21.
There’s only one instance during the past 12 games of a UK player other than Oweh, Aberdeen or Chandler logging at least 30 minutes. That came when Dioubate played 30 minutes off the bench in a road loss at Auburn. In that same period, Oweh’s had 11 games with 30 or more minutes played, Aberdeen’s had 10 and Chandler’s had eight.
This stretch has also included four instances of a UK player contributing three or fewer minutes in a game. Freshman guard Jasper Johnson (three minutes at Arkansas and two minutes at Auburn) and sophomore forward Trent Noah (three minutes at Florida and two minutes at home against the Gators) accounted for those.
“We’ve just got to find an answer,” Pope said. “There’s nowhere in there that’s an excuse. It’s just trying to find where your team functions and where your individual players function at their highest level. And so that’s a place that’s been challenging for us as we’ve had a really diminished roster.”
What to make of the extensive minutes for some UK players?
It makes sense that the Oweh, Aberdeen and Chandler trio — a group Oweh recently nicknamed the “Three-Headed GOAT” — would log significant minutes.
Oweh (18.2 points per game), Aberdeen (12.9) and Chandler (10.0) are UK’s leading scorers. For the season, they each rank in UK’s top three in assists, field goals made and 3-pointers made. They’re also three of five Kentucky players, along with Moreno and junior Brandon Garrison, to have played in all 31 games.
The cumulative effect of the minutes played by the Cats’ top three scorers can’t be discounted.
Pope singled out Oweh as an example.
Entering the SEC Tournament, Oweh has totaled a team-high 987 minutes this season. Only nine others in the conference have played more.
Since Jan. 21 — when Kentucky was reduced to just nine healthy players — Oweh has played 422 minutes. That’s the sixth-most in SEC, behind Tennessee’s Ja’Kobi Gillespie (467), Vanderbilt’s Tyler Tanner (441), Missouri’s Mark Mitchell (438), Arkansas’ Trevon Brazile (429) and Texas’ Dailyn Swain (427).
Gillespie played 13 games in this period while the others played 12. Tanner, Mitchell, Brazile and Swain all played at least one overtime game.
“He’s such an explosive, explosive, physical athlete that’s just taking on contact consistently,” Pope said of Oweh. “He functions better in that 32- to 34-minute zone, right? If we could just get him there. That’s a place where you rely on the numbers and kind of how it plays out. He’s a guy that works incredibly hard to be in the space he is, but the wear and tear of the style of play that he plays is enormous.”
Has playing too many minutes negatively affected the on-court performances of Oweh, Aberdeen or Chandler?
Some numbers suggest no.
Oweh is averaging more than 22 points per game during this recent 12-game stretch, which has included six of the 10 highest-scoring performances of his career. Aberdeen has come into his own as a distributor, totalling 50 assists against 13 turnovers. Chandler has reset his personal bests: He scored 18 or more points four times last month, and had three games with five or more 3-pointers.
Yet, recent figures show shortcomings that could be connected to the high amount of minutes played.
In three of Oweh’s past four games, he’s missed at least nine shots from the field. Oweh logged at least 37 minutes in each contest.
Aberdeen’s 3-point shot dried up last week. He went a combined 1 for 9 from deep in the losses to Texas A&M and Florida. It’s been more than a month since Aberdeen played less than 30 minutes in a contest.
Chandler is a combined 2 for 11 from the field in UK’s past two games. His five combined points across those contests represent his fewest points in a two-game stretch since the start of SEC play. Chandler was on the floor for 34 minutes against the Aggies and 35 minutes against the Gators.
Then there’s the most glaring statistic of all. Kentucky lost five of its final seven regular season games.
How can Mark Pope, UK basketball help with fatigue issues?
At this stage, what options are on the table for Kentucky to help with the burden placed on its “Three-Headed GOAT”?
Reinforcing UK’s depth would be a natural place to start. The 6-foot-8 Williams has made progress in his recovery. During his pre-SEC Tournament press conference on Tuesday, Pope left the door open for Williams to potentially play against LSU. Williams is listed as probable for the game on UK’s availability report.
The news is less optimistic for Quaintance, who has been limited to just four games this season and none since Jan. 7. Quaintance has yet to return to UK’s practices in a meaningful way.
What else could Pope do to manage the minutes of Oweh, Aberdeen and Chandler?
“Everybody has a different tolerance for minutes. As you study guys, you see where their production starts to go down,” Pope said. “So what we’d like to do is we’d like to do the very best we can — and it’s affected by all kinds of things — fouls and rotations and matchups and everything else, but we’d like to do the very best that we can to spread the minutes out the most we possibly can and be as competitive as we can.”
Some connected to the Kentucky program have downplayed the role that fatigue has played for the Cats. Following Saturday’s Senior Day loss to Florida, Jelavic was emphatic.
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Jelavic said when asked about Pope’s fatigue comments. “We are all like 19- to 21-year-old kids, so we don’t have problems with playing... If you can’t play two games in a week, you can’t play — and everybody wants to play — in the NBA. So if you can’t do it here, you can’t do it at the next level. It’s just not for you if you can’t do it.”
Neither Jelavic nor Pope nor anybody else in blue and white is pointing to fatigue as an outright excuse for Kentucky’s struggles. But the idea that Oweh, Aberdeen and Chandler may be struggling to stay fresh as the postseason arrives is valid, with plenty of evidence behind it.
What’s less clear, though, are the avenues Pope has at his disposal to address this.
