Summer basketball recruiting is likely lost. What does that mean for Kentucky?
Another extension this week of the NCAA’s ban on recruiting amid the coronavirus pandemic brings even more uncertainty for the high school basketball prospects who would otherwise be traveling the country — and auditioning for college scholarships — this spring and summer.
College coaches will remain at home, with old game film their only resources for scouting and phone calls and video chats their only outlets for relationship-building. The high school prospects they’re pursuing will — for the foreseeable future — have no games to play, no opportunities to expand their college options, no trips to see the schools recruiting them.
The National Association of Basketball Coaches on Tuesday recommended that the NCAA extend its ban on recruiting through at least July 31. The NCAA stopped a step short of that Wednesday — extending the ban only through the end of June — but the two bodies have been working in harmony on how to treat recruiting during the coronavirus pandemic since earlier this year, and it’s expected that recruiting activities scheduled for July will eventually be wiped out as well.
That would effectively cancel the traditional spring and summer recruiting calendar in its entirety. And though Kentucky will surely land more than its fair share of recruits once things return to some semblance of normalcy, this upheaval will affect exactly who plays for the Wildcats a year or two from now, and it could make things more challenging for Coach John Calipari in the short term.
Impact on 2021 class
The lack of grassroots basketball — and the recruiting opportunities that come as a result of the spring and summer schedule — will most affect the players in the class of 2021, prospects who would have played their final seasons on AAU-level circuits this year.
Normally, this would be the time when such players would be able to play in front of college coaches, further proving themselves to the schools already pursuing them and showing off their improved games for new suitors. Every year, there are a handful of players who emerge out of the spring and summer schedules as breakout stars. Scores of others go from being lightly recruited to earning multiple scholarship offers.
The two evaluation periods in April — two of the biggest recruiting weeks of the year — have already been lost due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The cancellation of June recruiting wiped out the NBPA Top 100 Camp, USA Basketball camps, and the new window for players to compete with their high school teams — in front of college coaches — for a few days in the summer.
The expected loss of July recruiting events would cancel two more evaluation periods, including the week featuring Nike’s Peach Jam and other major shoe company events.
The spring and summer calendar, under normal circumstances, also offered several weeks of opportunities for high school recruits to visit college campuses. Such trips are currently banned by the NCAA.
Other than losing out on a few months of competition and skill development — which should not be overlooked — the very best recruits in the 2021 class, like UK targets Paolo Banchero and Jaden Hardy, won’t miss much in the way of college scholarships. They already have their pick of schools.
For everyone else — including many potential UK targets — this is an opportunity lost.
Two recent UK recruits, Dontaie Allen and Lance Ware, are perfect examples of how this uncertain calendar could lead young players down a different path.
Allen had offers from Eastern Kentucky, Morehead State, Northern Kentucky, Illinois State, IUPUI and Winthrop going into spring AAU ball two years ago. He turned heads that April, word spread, and college coaches made it a point to reserve some time to see Allen play in July.
At the first major event that summer, he truly broke out. In a matter of days, he had scholarship offers from Louisville, Florida, Tennessee and a host of other major programs. By the end of the month, he had an offer from Kentucky, and in the first days of August, he committed to the Cats.
Before that first July evaluation period, Calipari had never seen him play in person. That’s how quickly things move in summer recruiting.
Ware, an incoming freshman in UK’s 2020 class, had been on the Wildcats’ radar for a couple of years, but Kentucky’s coaches were reluctant to pull the trigger on a scholarship offer. Then, last June, he got to spend some time with his high school team — and its new coach, Rick Brunson — and something in his game clicked, Calipari watched him play, and UK finally saw what it needed to extend an offer. A few weeks later, he committed to the Cats.
If players like Allen and Ware hadn’t had such opportunities to break out relatively late in their high school careers, they could have easily ended up at other colleges.
Recruiting relationships
Looking a little further into the future, the lack of in-person contact over these spring and summer months is likely to come back and bite some college coaches this time next year.
In addition to the on-the-court scouting that coaches engage in this time of year, building relationships with the players and their inner circles is a crucial part of the recruiting process.
For the time being, such relationships are being forged through phone calls and video meetings.
Texas Christian head coach Jamie Dixon — the president of the NABC — said in a video chat released by the NCAA on Wednesday that he’s enjoyed the Zoom meetings with recruits and their families. Dixon said such calls have been easy to arrange, and they offer an opportunity for multiple coaches — perhaps even the entire staff — to sit down and chat with a player and his inner circle at the same time. He concluded that coaches might even get to know players and their families a little bitter through this process compared to previous recruiting setups.
That could be a case of Dixon trying to publicly find some silver lining in a non-optimal situation. It’s not a universally shared opinion among other coaches who have spoken with the Herald-Leader in recent weeks.
While the “virtual meetings” do have their advantages — seeing players and their families without having to travel, being the most obvious — they can’t replace the experience of sitting down with a recruit face to face and really getting to know him and his inner circle.
The most successful recruiters are deft at combining the knowledge gained from in-person recruiting meetings with insight gleaned from talking to others around a player’s recruitment. That’s best accomplished in the home and in the gyms a player inhabits. Often, the best — and most accurate — recruiting information comes from third parties.
UK assistant coach Joel Justus talked last fall about the program’s philosophy for building relationships with recruits and figuring out who really wants to be part of Kentucky basketball, and who doesn’t; who’s cut out to be a Wildcat, and who isn’t.
“I think our biggest thing — and our role — is to get out there and find the information,” Justus told the Herald-Leader at the time. “Find out who is really built for Kentucky. Who is built to be a champion, who’s built to be a guy that wants to work every single day, who wants to be a great teammate. And that comes through time. That comes through information. And I think as far as just being ahead of what might happen.
“We, as assistants — and even as the head coach — you’ve got to really get to know the situation,” Justus also said of starting those recruiting relationships. “Some families have a tighter-knit circle. Others, maybe there’s a couple more folks that are involved because they want different folks’ input.”
This time last year, Jalen Green and Isaiah Todd were both five-star recruits and two of UK’s biggest targets. Daishen Nix was regarded as one of the top point guards in the class and had made it clear he wanted a UK scholarship offer. By last fall, after a few months of additional intel-gathering, Kentucky had moved on from Green and Todd — focusing instead on other recruits — and passed on offering Nix.
The Wildcats’ coaches discovered — through talking to and gathering information on the recruits — that, for various reasons, they might not be the best fits. A chief reason was the possibility that they could opt for pro ball instead of college. Ultimately, all three did just that, and Green, Nix, and Todd are now the biggest commitments to the G League’s revamped preps-to-pros program. The schools that continued to recruit them and took their commitments — it ends up — wasted valuable time and resources to do so, and they’ll now have to deal with roster holes left by their defections. Kentucky, meanwhile, moved on to get commitments from other talented players. The recon work paid off. If UK’s coaches had been limited to phone calls and Zoom meetings to come to their conclusions, things might have ended up differently.
Saving summer recruiting
Dixon said this week that — ever since the April evaluation periods were lost — college basketball’s decision-makers have been working toward figuring out a way to save the opportunities afforded by spring and summer recruiting.
There has been an ongoing dialogue between coaches’ groups like the NABC, the shoe companies, other event operators, and the NCAA to come up with a plan for added evaluation periods later in the year.
“I have great hope that we will get to see the kids we need to see, and the kids will be seen,” Dixon said.
Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s vice president in charge of men’s basketball, said in the same chat Wednesday that the organization is looking to add evaluation periods in the fall. It’s unclear what exactly these events would look like — or if college coaches would be permitted to travel and see them in person — but a mixture of offseason scholastic events with players’ high school teams and non-scholastic events with their travel teams is being explored.
“We’ll make sure that we get creative and provide change and opportunity in August, September and October for the class of 2021 and 2022 to be evaluated appropriately to play college basketball,” Gavitt said. “And I’m confident that we’ll be able to do that.”
Any such opportunity would be a positive for those recruits and the schools pursuing them. In addition to the scouting and relationship-building that Kentucky would have normally been doing with the class of 2021 prospects at this time, the UK coaches — especially the assistants — would have had an eye on players in the 2022 class. It was around this time last year that Banchero — arguably UK’s top 2021 target — began hearing from Kentucky’s coaches, for instance.
The NCAA also announced this week that it has indefinitely postponed the withdrawal date for the NBA Draft — originally set for June 3 — and will come up with a new date once the NBA finalizes its own pre-draft schedule.
This, too, will have UK recruiting implications if five-star center Makur Maker is serious about spending a season in college basketball should his plans for this year’s NBA Draft fall though. If 7-foot transfer Olivier Sarr doesn’t get approved by the NCAA to play right away at UK next season, the Cats will need some more help in the frontcourt. Postponing the withdrawal date — while UK waits to hear back from the NCAA on Sarr — leaves options open for Maker and other players still on the fence about staying in the draft.
Kentucky’s 2020-21 season
When players and coaches can congregate in the same places again, it’s been made clear that the first priority will be put on those who will actually be playing college basketball next season.
This will be especially critical for a Kentucky team that is filled with new faces — even by Calipari’s roster turnover standards — and will need as much time as possible to come together before the start of the 2020-21 season.
In the past, Calipari has used those summer months to build team chemistry. Normally, players would be arriving in Lexington in a few weeks for summer school, team workouts, and that getting-to-know-you time that is so valuable for a squad consisting of mostly newcomers.
With no in-person summer classes scheduled this year, it’s unclear just when players will be permitted to come to campus. A UK spokesman told the Herald-Leader this week that there is currently no set timetable for the players’ arrival in Lexington.
Gavitt expressed hope this week that student-athletes could start coming to campus in the relatively near future. Though restoring the recruiting calendar is a major focus of the NCAA and college coaches, getting time with their current and incoming players is the short-term priority.
“The focus, I think, from the coaches’ perspective, has been that when there’s an opportunity — likely in maybe late June or certainly July — to re-engage with their current players and their current team, hopefully on their campuses and summer school and with the return of the first semester of college, that’s where their focus needs to be,” Gavitt said.
Dixon said coaches will want to spend time with their teams for next season — not recruit for future seasons — when those players are allowed back on campus. That was part of the impetus for recommending calling off recruiting in July, and it will factor into the equation when developing a plan for new evaluation periods in the fall.
“We certainly didn’t want to be in a situation where our players were coming back to campus and then we were leaving that same day to go on the road recruiting,” he said. “I don’t think that would have sent a good message to families, parents, or to our student-athletes. Our players right now are our most important assets.”
So, perhaps, Calipari and the UK coaches could still get a good amount of valuable time with the 2020-21 squad ahead of next season. But that timetable is far from certain. If there is a major loss of in-person time between the Kentucky coaches and players this summer and fall — with nine new scholarship players on the roster, and just two such Wildcats returning — expectations for the 2020-21 season should probably be adjusted.
247Sports national analyst Evan Daniels told the Herald-Leader that UK fans will need to be realistic in what they expect from so many new players — talented as they might be — who are playing together for the first time, especially in the early going.
The biggest part of the summer is team chemistry and player development, Daniels said. Having everyone on campus also provides a support system and collective sense of direction. Any missed time — especially for the six teenagers who make up UK’s 2020 recruiting class — could hurt in the long run.
“And a lot of these kids are going to miss out on that,” Daniels said. “So there’s going to have to be a lot of skill development. And the guys who are willing to work are the guys who are going to come out of this thing OK. The guys who are going to be lazy all summer — because they’re not around coaches — this is going to impact them.”
