Jasper Johnson leaving UK basketball team after ‘super frustrating’ freshman year
Jasper Johnson, a celebrated addition to Mark Pope’s 2025 recruiting class at Kentucky, will be leaving the program after just one season.
Johnson, who turned 20 years old last month, will enter the NCAA transfer portal and look for other possibilities within college basketball for the 2026-27 season. Longtime NBA draft analyst Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress was first to report Johnson’s intention to enter the portal, which won’t officially open until Tuesday.
The Kentucky native wasn’t shy about his one-and-done NBA aspirations when he joined the team last year, but he had trouble carving out a role within Pope’s rotation as his freshman season wore on and never came close to realizing the draft-level upside that accompanied the hype around his recruitment.
Johnson averaged 4.9 points and 1.6 assists in 12.0 minutes per game, coming off the bench in all 35 of his appearances for the Cats this past season. He was 31 for 91 (34.1%) from 3-point range and rarely seemed fully comfortable in Pope’s offensive system while also struggling defensively.
Even with injuries in the UK backcourt — most notably, a season-ending injury to Jaland Lowe, who was expected to be the team’s starting point guard — Johnson’s playing time dwindled in big games as the season wore on.
He played only two minutes in the Cats’ overtime victory over Santa Clara in the first round of the NCAA Tournament and was on the floor for six minutes in UK’s 82-63 loss to Iowa State in the second round of March Madness.
Johnson never scored more than four points in a game over the final month of the season and played double-digit minutes just once — 11 against Florida in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals — across Kentucky’s five postseason games.
He did score in double figures five times — including a career-high 22 points in a 103-67 win over North Carolina Central on Dec. 9, and 12 points in UK’s upset victory at Tennessee on Jan. 17 — but the flashy scoring ability that he was known for in high school wasn’t consistently there in his first year of college.
Johnson, who is listed at 6-5 and 180 pounds, acknowledged before the season began that he would need to add strength to be able to compete at the level he wanted to at the high-major level. Pope also said on several occasions that the injury to Lowe — and the domino effect it had on the rest of UK’s backcourt — set up an unfair set of circumstances for his highly touted freshman.
“Losing J-Lowe affected so many guys on our team, losing that position,” he said on his final radio show of the season Monday night. “I’ll take Jasper Johnson as a specific example. Jasper Johnson had moments of his season that were super frustrating for him, for sure. It really wasn’t fair to ask him to play the backup point guard role, but it was something we needed, if nothing else, just to give a little bit of legs and life to (Denzel Aberdeen), to give him support.
“But it wasn’t just Jasper playing the point. We lost Jasper as being the dangerous scoring 2 guard that he was brought here to be, where he can actually start working in the corner — begin possessions coming off screens — that’s where he’s really dangerous. So we didn’t get a lot of that from Jasper this year.”
Johnson, who started his high school career at Woodford County and finished up in the Overtime Elite system in Atlanta, was the No. 24 overall player in the final 247Sports rankings for the class of 2025 and a consensus five-star recruit in that group.
Alabama and North Carolina were the top competition for Kentucky at the end of his high school recruitment, and Arkansas and Louisville also made Johnson’s final five. He’s expected to have many high-level suitors in the transfer portal.
Johnson is also the son of UK football legend Dennis Johnson and the nephew of former UK football player Derrick Johnson, who criticized the way Kentucky basketball players were treated by fans, social media users, “fake media” sites and “official” media outlets over the course of the 2025-26 season, which ended with a 22-14 record and fell well short of expectations.
“I’m thankful for those who support my family,” Derrick Johnson wrote in his Facebook post two days after UK’s season came to an end last month. “But these last four months — what I thought would be an exciting time watching my nephew chase his dreams — have turned into one of the most disappointing experiences I’ve ever seen.
“I’ve never witnessed people be so nasty, whether it’s on ‘real’ sites or not. Those are real people behind those comments. Playing in 30-second intervals… never really given a chance. Not my decision — but hopefully, you’ll get your wish.”
Johnson is the second UK player who has signaled a move to the transfer portal this offseason, joining Lowe, who will also move on from Kentucky after one season with the program.
The portal does not officially open until Tuesday, but dozens of players from around college basketball have already said they plan to enter when that date comes. The deadline to enter the portal is April 21, but players do not have to choose a new school by that date.
