‘This is not an excuse fest.’ But Mark Pope knows he needs to fix this problem
Nearly an hour into his final radio show of the season and apparently aware of how some fans might be digesting everything he’d been saying on the air, Mark Pope paused for clarification.
“Listen, this is not an excuse fest,” the Kentucky basketball coach said. “We know where we need to go. This is just explaining the facts of where we are.”
At that moment, Pope was explaining why his second UK basketball team, which saw its season come to an end the previous day, hadn’t shot nearly as many 3-pointers as he’d hoped. But much of the show to that point had been a defense of the path this UK program is on.
Whether individual fans viewed Pope’s hourlong presentation as one filled with legitimate reasons for the Cats’ failure to live up to preseason expectations — or the “excuse fest” that he denied it was — likely depended on those fans’ opinion of the Kentucky coach before the show began, but the facts he laid out were valid.
And many of them were related to UK’s situation at point guard.
The play at that position has not gone according to plan in either of Pope’s two seasons as Kentucky’s head coach, and the circumstances have been largely beyond his control.
In Year 1, he managed to pluck Lamont Butler and Kerr Kriisa out of the transfer portal. Landing two high-major talents at the same position — and getting Kriisa, a starter at Arizona and West Virginia, to go along with being Butler’s backup as a senior — was viewed as a coup.
Kriisa suffered a season-ending injury in December, while Butler injured his shoulder multiple times throughout the season and played the NCAA Tournament at far less than 100% health.
In Year 2, Pope got a commitment from Pittsburgh point guard Jaland Lowe, with highly touted recruit Acaden Lewis already signed and destined for a backup role in his freshman season. But Lowe was injured in the preseason — playing nine games at far less than 100% — before being ruled out for the rest of the season in January. And Lewis decommitted not long after Lowe picked the Cats.
The injuries, as Pope pointed out Monday, could not have been foreseen.
“It’s not soft tissue stuff that’s holding our guys out of games,” he said on the radio show. “It’s not stability. It’s not strength stuff. It’s been random things.”
And that’s true. The types of injuries that have hindered UK’s point guard play in both seasons — as well as the one that knocked a red-hot Jaxson Robinson out for the season last year — have been random occurrences that happened to players with no extensive injury history.
One of the facts Pope offered up Monday night: His teams have played 72 games over the past two seasons, and only 10 have been played with a full roster. In 56 games against power-conference teams, he said, only five featured Kentucky’s full complement of players.
“And that is a real thing,” he said. “That’s been a real issue for us.”
Nowhere has it been more glaring than at point guard, and while Pope paused on multiple occasions to say he didn’t want what he was saying to come off as “excuses,” he knows as well as anyone that Kentucky must get it right at that position for the upcoming season.
Kentucky’s point guard problems
Pope’s first team was able to overcome the injury issues and still earn a 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament and the program’s first trip to a Sweet 16 in six years. Butler was also able to manage his injury and make an impact down the stretch, even in a limited fashion.
Lowe also tried to play through his injury — dislocating his right shoulder on several occasions over the span of a few months — before he had no other logical choice than to shut it down and undergo surgery.
That left Pope with limited options that, he says, had a negative ripple effect on everything else.
Lewis was supposed to be the backup, but he reopened his recruitment five days after Lowe’s commitment became public. The prevailing narrative has been that Lewis didn’t want to be a backup for two seasons — the amount of eligibility Lowe still had — and he thought Pope was going to pursue a senior point guard, allowing him to be an understudy for just one year.
Pope pushed back on that narrative for the first time this week.
“We had Acaden Lewis here as a signed commit,” he said. “Actually, his family, on their own, engaged in helping to recruit Jaland Lowe. And then once that was (set), we felt like, ‘Man, we have the greatest one-two punch at the point guard.’ Felt like those guys would have played on the court beautifully together. And then late — after all that process was gone — for his own personal reasons, family reasons, they decided to go.”
Lewis transferred to Villanova and started all 33 games for the NCAA Tournament team, averaging 12.2 points, 5.3 assists and 1.9 steals per game. He was second in the Big East in assists — behind only UConn’s Silas Demary Jr. — and top 50 nationally, an indication he could have thrived in the backup role and held his own as UK’s starting point guard had he been on the roster when Lowe was injured.
Pope also pointed out that Travis Perry was a deeper option at point guard as a freshman last season and expected to play a similar role as a sophomore, but he unexpectedly hit the transfer portal after Kentucky built what appeared to be a loaded backcourt last offseason.
“We thought we were abundantly prepared at that position,” Pope said, pointing out that the defections of Lewis and Perry came too late to fully rectify, given the number of talented transfers already off the board and the difficulty of getting two starter-level players at the same position, even under ideal conditions.
UK did add Florida transfer Denzel Aberdeen after Lewis decommitted, but he was viewed more as a 2 guard who could play some minutes at the 1 in a pinch, not the starter at point guard that he ultimately became.
Pope spent five uninterrupted minutes of his final radio show laying out all the negative ripple effects that resulted from Lowe’s season-ending injury.
In part, he acknowledged that the staff rebuilt its plan for the position, and, in effect, the entire offense, around having a left-handed point guard — Lowe and Lewis are both lefties — and they stuck to that plan with the thinking that star recruit Jasper Johnson (another lefty) would be filling in some behind Lowe during his freshman year.
Pope explained the benefits of having a left-handed point guard working with right-handed bigs, especially in pick-and-roll situations. “You get both guys working a strong hand. Really, really important. And we changed the orientation of everything we did on the offense.”
Even when UK lost Lowe in the Blue-White scrimmage in October, Pope said the staff decided to keep the offensive structure it had worked on all offseason, assuming Lowe would return. He did return — and his capabilities were on full display in the second half of the pivotal victory over St. John’s in December — but he was sidelined for good in early January.
“We’re like, ‘Man, we’re so deep in right now. it’s going to be really hard to change everything we have,’” Pope said. “That was one of the complications. There’s like a dozen different things like that.”
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Negative effect for UK basketball
Pope went on to lay out all of the ways Lowe’s injury — and having no true backup — hurt his team down the stretch.
He led that breakdown with Johnson, who was known as one of the most creative scorers in the 2025 high school class. Johnson, Pope said, would have been a 2 for UK if the original plan had stayed intact, but Lewis’ defection and Lowe’s injury forced him into a backup 1 role, at times, during his freshman year.
Johnson often looked uncomfortable in the role, either dribbling too much or getting physically overwhelmed or simply making poor reads and passes as a primary ball handler.
Pope pointed out that — with Johnson playing at the point — the Cats lost the electric recruit as a dangerous scorer at the 2 spot and as a secondary passer. The coach said Johnson could thrive in the latter role — and he did make a nice touch pass that led to an open 3-pointer in UK’s loss to Iowa State — but he didn’t get a chance to fully pursue the position.
“Jasper Johnson was actually one of our most capable passers, but we lose him as a 2 guard creator, because he’s under so much duress as a primary ball handler,” he said.
Aberdeen, meanwhile, grew as UK’s on-ball presence and was able to limit mistakes for most of the season, but he rarely put up big assist numbers. Not a point guard by trade, he often had tunnel vision when driving the ball, and that led to fewer opportunities elsewhere and a departure from the kind of creative offense that Pope ran at BYU and in his first season at UK.
“When was the last time you saw us actually get off a ball screen and throw a lob?” Pope said. “You saw a lot of Iowa State doing that. (Tamin) Lipsey is one of the best point guards in the country, and he sees the whole floor. When’s the last time you saw us come off a ball screen and be able to zip a hook pass — across court to a corner or a wing — where it’s earning guys, like a Trent Noah, for example, one of the best shooters in the country, earning him an open shot that he might not create for himself?
“Think about what it does for Denzel Aberdeen, letting him play the position that he came here to play, which is just like a scary, scary, scary scorer that was super creative and super aggressive.”
Pope also lamented the loss of Lowe when talking about what turned out to be UK’s inability to deal with defensive pressure.
With Lowe? “When you try to send a second defender at him in the halfcourt, he turns it into a circus,” Pope said.
Without Lowe? The best example was probably the final one, when Iowa State forced Kentucky into a season-high 20 turnovers — a number that would have been higher if the score had been closer at the end — by pressuring the Cats defensively and often sending two defenders at the ball.
“We were the aggressor. Our ball movement was extraordinary,” Pope said of the start of that game. “And then the more stagnant we got, the more difficult the game became.”
This overall lack of ball movement also kept Kentucky well short of its stated goal of attempting 35 3-pointers per game. The Cats didn’t hit that number in any of their 36 games this season, and they averaged only 22.4 attempts per game, about three fewer than in Pope’s first season.
“Threes come through ball movement,” Pope said. “They come through creators, right? And, man, we just lost that.”
Attacking the transfer portal
So that’s what happened this past season.
The final results — a 22-14 record and second-round March Madness loss — won’t appease anyone, and even if Pope has valid reasons for some of the shortcomings, he knows he’ll need to have a better plan in place for the point guard spot moving forward.
That means finding the right guys this offseason, on and off the ball.
Lowe revealed Saturday that he will enter the transfer portal when it opens next month. With Aberdeen out of eligibility and Johnson expected to leave, Pope will need to find at least a couple of capable point guards this offseason.
The Kentucky head coach got an early start by adding four-star recruit Mason Williams as a high school commitment Friday afternoon. Williams, the son of former NBA guard Mo Williams, is ranked No. 109 in the class of 2026 by 247Sports, but UK moved quickly to land him after its season ended last weekend, hosting Williams and his family on a campus visit Wednesday and securing his pledge 48 hours later.
Williams could emerge as a quality depth piece in Year 1 for the Cats.
With Lowe moving on, Pope will be targeting the best of the best of the guys who hit the portal. Oregon point guard Jackson Shelstad has already signaled his intention to transfer (though he’s also being linked to Arizona). BYU’s Rob Wright is on the record saying he won’t transfer, but his name keeps popping up in national circles as a possibility to hit the portal. More names will emerge in the coming days, with the portal set to officially open April 7.
Pope should be able to land a quality starter. Finding a talented player willing to be a backup could prove more difficult, though he pulled it off with Butler and Kriisa two years ago, and Williams might be able to fill that role.
Beyond the point guard spot itself, Pope has stressed the importance of adding “creators” to his offensive approach. That means guys who can create for others in a variety of ways.
He had a roster filled with them in his first season, the ball often whipping around the perimeter until someone ended up with a wide-open shot or driving lane. Pope pointed to 7-footer Amari Williams as an example of his vision there. While they showed flashes this season, Malachi Moreno and Brandon Garrison weren’t able to replicate Williams’ unique role from Year 1.
“We are desperate to bring creators here to Kentucky,” Pope said. “Creators are people that earn shots for teammates and can go earn shots for themselves. … The best teams are creator rich. And unfortunately for us, due in large part to the changes that we underwent at the point guard spot, that was a place where we struggled all year long.
“Creators deal with pressure. Creators earn guys better shots. Creators make shots for themselves. And that’s a space where we’re going to have a high, high focus as we build this roster for next season.”
That’s the next step.
Pope will have some help there, too. UK officially announced the addition of Keegan Brown as the program’s “director of roster management” Thursday. Brown spent five years with Pope at BYU and aided him in identifying talent to play within the coach’s offensive system there.
Williams, for instance, was among the players being pursued by the BYU staff before Pope took the Kentucky job and ultimately brought him to Lexington.
No. 1 overall recruit Tyran Stokes, who remains a major UK target, is also viewed as a player who could be a talented passer at the college level, especially in the right offensive setting. Santa Clara forward Allen Graves, who has been mentioned as a portal possibility and was name-dropped by Pope on his Monday radio show, would also fit that bill while providing NBA prospect-level talent elsewhere on the court.
Pope made clear Monday night that he will go into this offseason with the financial resources to put together a roster that should compete at the Final Four level in 2027. Finding the right mix of players — especially those that fit the “creator” label — will be crucial.
“You could not ask for a more supportive administration,” Pope said. “The president is supportive. BBN is incredibly supportive. And so we will have everything that we need to go get the roster that we want to have.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2026 at 6:30 AM.
