If Orlando Antigua was still at Kentucky, what would the program look like?
We asked for your questions on the Kentucky men’s basketball team, its slow start to the season, and the Wildcats’ recruiting efforts earlier in the week, and there were several good ones.
Here’s the first batch of answers to those questions, with more coming later in the week.
Do you feel the UK program has lost something since Orlando Antigua left? Illinois is top 5, UK is 1-3. Is there a correlation there?
This one was sent in before Illinois’ loss to Missouri over the weekend — and UK’s loss to Notre Dame, the Cats’ fourth straight — but the question remains just as relevant.
Illinois, where Antigua is now employed as an assistant coach, is one of the top teams in college basketball this season with an early victory at Duke on its résumé. Kentucky, where Antigua was employed as an assistant coach from 2009 to 2014, is off to a 1-4 start, its worst in nearly 40 years.
The easy answer to this one is, yes, clearly Kentucky lost something with Antigua’s departure to take the South Florida head coaching job after the 2013-14 season. At that time, Coach O was seen as one of the nation’s best recruiters. He came with John Calipari from Memphis, was part of the Cats’ 2012 national title team, and he played an integral role in getting some of Kentucky’s best players in the early years of the Calipari era to Lexington. He was — and remains — a highly respected coach and recruiter, and he had an innate ability to connect with the high-level prospects (and their parents and coaches) that UK was recruiting.
So, yes, it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to fully replace someone like Antigua.
All that said, I don’t think this season — or UK’s program as a whole — would look much different if Coach O were still here.
His departure lined up very neatly with the period in time where other college programs started to go all-in with the type of one-and-done talent UK had been getting to that point. Calipari certainly wasn’t alone in his pursuit of those players in his first few years at Kentucky, but schools like Duke weren’t recruiting those prospects with as much fervor as they did later on — the Duke class that featured Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow came in the same year that Antigua left UK, for example — and it was around that time when more and more top recruits seemingly began making less conventional college choices.
Of the very top recruits that UK has missed on over the past few cycles — Paolo Banchero, Cade Cunningham, James Wiseman, Vernon Carey, Scottie Lewis, RJ Barrett, Cam Reddish, Zion Williamson, Marvin Bagley, Mohamed Bamba, Harry Giles and Jayson Tatum — I can’t point to a single one and say, “Yes, I think UK would have had a demonstrably better shot with that player had Antigua been on staff.”
Every single one of those prospects had either a pre-existing tie to the school they picked or something else related to their recruitment that would have been incredibly difficult for Antigua to overcome. Maaaybe UK would have extended a scholarship offer to someone like Isaiah Stewart earlier in the process if Antigua had been around, but those decisions are ultimately up to Calipari, and it’s not like the UK coach didn’t know who Stewart was at an early point in his high school career. (Also, Stewart would have been on last season’s team, which wasn’t able to play in the NCAA Tournament due to COVID-19, so Kentucky wouldn’t have gained any additional postseason accolades through his addition anyway).
It’s also important to note that Illinois is winning with a different combination of players than Antigua recruited and coached at Kentucky.
The Illini have zero projected first-round picks in next year’s NBA Draft, zero surefire one-and-done players, zero five-star recruits. They do have a mix of highly touted prospects who were ranked in the back end of the top 50 (Kofi Cockburn, Ayo Dosunmo, Andre Curbelo and Adam Miller) and players who were ranked outside the top 100 as recruits but have emerged as key contributors (Trent Frazier, Da’Monte Williams and Giorgi Bezhanishvili). That group, by the way, consists of two seniors, two juniors, one sophomore and two freshmen — all of whom have spent their entire college careers at Illinois. Imagine that.
Calipari hasn’t recruited like that, and he hasn’t been able to retain players like that. There’s no reason to think that, if Antigua had never left, any of that would be any different. Should Calipari adapt his recruiting strategy to be less reliant on one-and-done players with more of an emphasis on recruiting, retaining and developing “lesser” prospects? That’s a question for another mailbag.
Yes, Kentucky definitely lost something with Antigua’s departure. That happens whenever you lose a valued member of your program. But I’m not sure this roster or the Wildcats’ short-term recruiting outlook would be much different if Coach O were still here.
Who will get the next UK scholarship offers? And when?
Kentucky is notoriously meticulous when it comes to doling out scholarship offers, and that’s only been more true during this COVID-related “dead period” for recruiting activities.
John Calipari likes to see players in person multiple times, meet with them and their families/inner circles, and get them on campus for extended visits. Obviously, none of that is permitted during the dead period, which has been in effect since March and currently runs through April 15 (though it could be extended yet again in the coming months).
UK has sent out some offers to players that had already been on campus (like Skyy Clark) and other top-10 talents that the coaching staff was familiar with (like Daimion Collins, Jalen Duren and Hunter Sallis). But, relatively few UK offers have been extended over the past year.
I’m not sure that will change much in the coming months, especially with the hope that the recruiting lockdown might finally end in April and allow coaches to get a better look at prospects.
UK was already trending toward not rushing to offer players who needed to hear they had an offer just to keep the Cats on their list. The thinking with such prospects was that if they required a UK offer as something of a status symbol, they probably wouldn’t be the right fit for the program. As long as a player felt valued by the coaching staff, the words, “You have an offer,” could wait.
With three players already signed for next season, a few others in the 2021 class with offers in hand, and the Cats likely to be active with transfers, the next group of offer recipients will almost certainly come from the 2022 class. And there’s no rush there. Those players still have two seasons of high school ball, and, hopefully, another year on the grassroots circuits.
All that said, a few names to watch on the offer front will be Efton Reid, Jaden Bradley, Scoota Henderson and DJ Wagner.
Reid — a 6-foot-11 center — is a 2021 recruit. There’s no word of a UK offer yet, but the Cats have remained in contact for more than a year, and Reid has been quiet about his recruitment. Bradley and Henderson — both point guards — are two of the best overall players in the 2022 class, and Kentucky has stayed in regular contact with both. (Bradley has also visited Lexington). Wagner is the No. 1 player in the 2023 class and comes from a family — his grandfather is Milt Wagner, his dad is Dajuan Wagner — that Calipari knows very well.
The status of an “offer” has become somewhat overblown in recruiting parlance, especially as it relates to Kentucky. What it really boils down to is: If a player calls up a head coach and says he wants to commit, will the coach accept that commitment? It would be difficult to see Calipari turning down any of the aforementioned players in such a situation.
But, those recruitments haven’t evolved to that point yet. So long as any player UK is interested in recognizes and reciprocates that interest, Calipari has no need to go out of his way to say, “You have an offer,” until a recruitment reaches its latter stages.
By the summer, I do expect that several 2022 prospects will have UK scholarship offers. Clark is committed, and Duren — the top available player in the class — has one. Bradley and Henderson are worth watching. West Virginia shooting guard Isaac McKneely is worth keeping an eye on. Five-star power forward Sadraque Nganga has called Kentucky his dream school. Expect UK to hit talent-rich Texas hard — especially now that Jai Lucas is on staff — and it sounds like five-star prospects Keyonte George and Cason Wallace are off to hot starts.
This is a deep 2022 class. Offers will be coming. But Calipari will probably want to see more — and, hopefully, actually meet some players in person — before sending out too many of those offers.
How much of the poor early start can be attributed to the staff’s recent shake-up? I think COVID-19 is the largest factor, but could it also be the new staff hasn’t found its footing either?
I think it’s mostly COVID-related, but, yeah, there’s probably something to this. And the pandemic has affected this coaching staff, as well.
The players on the court didn’t get nearly as much time together in the summer and preseason as past Calipari teams (and many of those teams struggled out of the gate, too). There were no exhibition games, no series of cupcake games, and relatively little practice time for a squad made up entirely of players who have never played together. That’s tough, and it’s showing.
The timing of the staff shake-up probably didn’t help.
Kenny Payne, who had been at Kentucky for the past 10 years, left for the NBA. Tony Barbee was moved to a new role, and two new coaches — Bruiser Flint and Jai Lucas — were added to the staff. Obviously, Calipari still has Barbee, Joel Justus and John Robic on staff, and all remain integral parts of UK’s program and player instruction and development. Calipari has also known Flint for decades, though the two haven’t actually worked together on the same staff in 25 years. Lucas, who spent the past four years as a Texas assistant, came to Lexington without an in-depth relationship with any of Kentucky’s coaches.
That’s a lot of talented coaches in one program, and trying to figure out everyone’s strengths relating to on-court instruction and team preparation is no easy task in the most ideal of situations. This, obviously, hasn’t been the most ideal of situations.
Past viewings of UK practices have made it clear that Calipari runs the show, but the assistant coaches are hands-on, especially in side sessions with position groups. Assistants have also been key with getting new players adjusted in the preseason and working with them individually in the Craft Center. All of that has been affected by COVID-related protocols. And if you watched the assistants on the UK bench in past seasons, they were constantly communicating with each other and UK’s players and Calipari throughout the game. This year, they’re stationed several feet apart, spread across the socially distanced Wildcats sideline. That makes conversing on what’s happening on the court in real time difficult.
Just as Calipari must get a feel for his players — and vice versa — and his players must get a feel for each other, the coaching staff — with a key departure, shifting roles and two new faces — must get acquainted with each other, too.
That feeling-out process likely would have been a season-long work in progress no matter what. Figuring it all out with a brand new team team amid a pandemic obviously isn’t an optimal situation.
