Is it time for John Calipari to shake up his recruiting strategy?
Last week, we asked for your questions on this Kentucky men’s basketball team and the Wildcats’ general recruiting efforts. There were several good questions, which were answered in a couple of online mailbag posts.
There were also lots of comments, many expressing concern with the direction of UK’s program and the lack of roster continuity. There’s clearly a sense of malaise among a sizable segment of the Kentucky fan base with the way John Calipari has been constructing his roster. This has been evident for a few years, but — with the Wildcats off to a 1-5 start behind another brand new bunch of players — the frustration seems to be spilling over.
One UK season ticket holder asked what many have been expressing: “Why does Coach Calipari continue to use this one-and-done model even though his most successful teams had experience?”
There were lots of calls for a new recruiting strategy. Lots of questioning the “flawed plan” — as that season ticket holder put it — that has kept Kentucky out of the Final Four since 2015, despite ending up with top-ranked recruiting classes every year.
It’s certainly a fair question.
Putting aside the excuse that this struggling Kentucky team is uniquely affected by the lack of a normal preseason and early-season schedule — and it’s a valid excuse — the Cats are in this position precisely because there is so much roster turnover from year to year. No returning players, other than the injured Keion Brooks, means Calipari is starting from scratch. The record to begin this season might be an anomaly, but the circumstances are the same just about every year.
Keep in mind that the overall results have still been very good during this Final Four “drought.” The Cats were a last-second shot in 2017 and a free throw in 2019 away from getting two more Final Four trips. And who knows what would have happened if last season’s team would have had an opportunity to play in the NCAA Tournament?
All that said, a considerable portion of Big Blue Nation would like to see some kind of change.
What would that change look like?
One-and-done fatigue
Calipari and the UK coaching staff have already been transitioning away from simply locking in on the most elite players in every class — after getting burned a few too many times — in favor of a more nuanced approach that has included a mix of elite five-star players and others ranked a little further down the list.
The current freshman class, for instance, has two top-10 recruits (Brandon Boston and Terrence Clarke), three ranked between 30th and 40th nationally (Devin Askew, Isaiah Jackson and Lance Ware) and another (Cam’Ron Fletcher) ranked around 70th in his class.
Next season’s class is shaping up to be a similar bunch, with top-10 recruit Daimion Collins already signed, along with Nolan Hickman and Bryce Hopkins, who are both ranked between 25th and 50th nationally. The Cats are also still pursuing a couple of surefire one-and-done players (Jaden Hardy and Hunter Sallis), the No. 22 recruit in the class (Efton Reid) and a player ranked in the back end of the top 100 (Brandin Podziemski).
Askew, Ware and Fletcher all came in projected to be multi-year players. Same for Hickman and Hopkins. This could be a good start to adding some continuity to the UK roster and combating the valid and oft-used line by Kentucky fans: “We don’t know any of these guys.”
To get the ball rolling on less roster turnover, some of those players obviously have to come back.
Several recent Kentucky players — such as Jemarl Baker, Quade Green and Johnny Juzang — have transferred out of the program rather than stay and develop. In some cases, those players saw little immediate opportunity for playing time. It’s difficult to develop if you don’t get to play meaningful minutes in actual games. And if you’re regarded as a top 50 national recruit, you know there will be more immediate opportunities elsewhere.
Calipari is also quick to mention players like Devin Booker and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Tyler Herro as examples of guys Kentucky recruited to be multi-year players who outplayed their rankings and jumped to the NBA. That’s fair. It’s also a relatively small list. And it’s also fair to point out that some others who came in as projected or possible one-and-dones — like PJ Washington and Ashton Hagans and EJ Montgomery — did return for a second season.
UK has actually been recruiting over the past couple of years in a way that should lead to some roster continuity. So, how do you get guys to stay?
NBA mentality
Calipari often says that he promises nothing in his recruiting pitches. This is true. There’s no promise of X amount of minutes or shots or anything else. He often highlights players’ weaknesses as part of his pitch, and he stresses how difficult playing for Kentucky will be.
Outside of that message, however, is an overall vibe that if a recruit comes to Kentucky, he’s destined for an NBA career. And there’s now, ingrained in UK’s program, a feeling that one has failed if he’s not off to the NBA Draft in one or — at the very most — two years.
Calipari’s frequent public comments in the past that players shouldn’t come to Kentucky if they plan to stay for four years — a line that has also been used on the recruiting trail — don’t help the situation. But it’s the overall brand of the program — despite the, “Nothing is promised” mentality — that lends itself to so much personnel turnover.
On recruiting trips and in-home visits, prospects and their families are shown visuals of Calipari’s past players in their current NBA uniforms and hit with the number of how many of those players have earned max contracts, with combined earnings now in the billions.
Before they arrive on campus, future UK players are labeled as the next big thing in college basketball. (Those who cover recruiting are obviously guilty of that). There are comparisons to Anthony Davis and John Wall and Booker and Herro. Mock drafts are posted before college careers begin.
During the season, UK’s players practice on a court with huge posters featuring former Wildcats in the NBA looking down on them. The wall outside the Rupp locker room is a mural filled with literally dozens of ex-Kentucky players now in the league. Official social media campaigns, and, sometimes, Calipari’s own words, make the case that whatever happens “next” is more important than what happens when UK’s players are in college. That hasn’t sat well with longtime fans — even though, in the case of the individual players, it is and should be true that what happens next matters most — but, more importantly to this point, it fosters the notion of Kentucky as a place to pass a few months’ time before moving on to a pro career.
With everything going on around them, can you really blame UK players for thinking such?
That kind of overriding mentality, which trickles down to just about every scholarship player on the team, isn’t conducive to roster continuity. That mentality is also so associated with Kentucky basketball, in general, and Calipari, specifically, that it will be tough to shake. A UK scholarship offer is now seen as a ticket to the NBA, even if it’s not explicitly sold as such.
Other programs have been able to mix top-end, one-and-done talent with returning players for a blend of star power and experience that equals national titles. But few have been able to achieve that balance and pair it with the type of sustained success that Kentucky has enjoyed. Again, the Cats haven’t been to the Final Four in five years, but — in the four tournaments since their last trip — they’ve reached two Elite Eights and a Sweet 16, with all three of those March eliminations coming down to the final shot. That’s pretty impressive.
Yet, many UK fans want something more. Or, at the very least, something different.
Recruit the Kentucky kids?
Bringing in more players from the Bluegrass is one of the changes many of those Kentucky fans would like to see. And watching players like Taveion Hollingsworth and Justin Powell light it up for other teams only amplifies those calls.
That, too, is a balancing act that would require some overall shifts in recruiting and roster construction.
Hollingsworth was a Lexington kid who grew up rooting for the Cats, and he was basically told to wait until the end of his senior year to see if he would get a Kentucky offer. He, understandably, didn’t want to do that, chose Western Kentucky and pretty immediately turned into a star for the Hilltoppers.
He’s a great college player, but does anyone really think — based on Calipari’s past lineup decisions — that Hollingsworth would have played much at all for UK in the early going? He wasn’t going to get many opportunities over five-star players like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Hamidou Diallo and Quade Green as a freshman. The next season, UK’s backcourt consisted of Green and two more five-star point guards — Ashton Hagans and Immanuel Quickley — along with perimeter standouts Tyler Herro and Keldon Johnson. Last season, when Hollingsworth was a college junior, Hagans and Quickley were joined by five-star freshman Tyrese Maxey.
Calipari has shown in the past that he’s going to let his star recruits play through some mistakes. Hollingsworth might have been able to get some minutes here and there, but he wouldn’t have been able to achieve what he’s achieved at Western with here-and-there minutes. Unless he came out in his first game and knocked down a few three-pointers in a row while playing solid defense, he likely would’ve been relegated to “role player” — at best — right off the bat.
Players like Hollingsworth excel when they’re able to get in a rhythm, and it’s difficult — nearly impossible — to get in a rhythm unless you get to stay in the court.
Powell, a Louisville native already starring as an Auburn freshman, is a similar player with an added wrinkle: he never grew up rooting for Kentucky. He and his family were Syracuse fans — his parents have New York ties — and, while he expressed excitement to the Herald-Leader when UK started recruiting him, it was clear the Wildcats wouldn’t have any kind of home-state advantage. As much as Kentucky fans would like to think in-state players should be easy gets, it’s just not the case.
And UK has brought in some local prospects.
Dontaie Allen — a former top 100 national recruit — is a redshirt freshman this season. He’s played fewer minutes than every healthy scholarship player. He didn’t play at all in two games. In another, he was pulled out and later singled out for some early turnovers. And on Saturday against North Carolina, he played only the final one minute and nine seconds, once the game was out of reach and after four teammates had fouled out.
Like Hollingsworth — and, honestly, most offensively gifted players — Allen was a rhythm player in high school, but he’ll need extended minutes to show off what he can do. Maybe he’s not ready to do that at this level right now — no harm in that; he’s a freshman — but much of development comes through playing time, and that might not be in abundance this season.
Dominique Hawkins and Derek Willis both came to UK in the 2013 recruiting class, and both are now playing pro basketball. But Hawkins — despite proving himself as a terrific defender in the NCAA Tournament as a freshman — didn’t get regular playing time until his senior year and, even then, wasn’t a featured player. Willis didn’t play much at all in his first two seasons, while surrounded by elite players. It’s not hard to envision either of those former Wildcats having a Hollingsworth-like impact from the start if they had picked another school.
Hawkins and Willis are both examples of players that stuck it out and ultimately got to play meaningful minutes for Kentucky — and will be beloved Wildcats for years to come — but they’re also counters to the argument that eliminating roster turnover is an easy, quick fix to be solved by bringing in lesser-ranked prospects, even those from inside the state. Or that such players would get serious opportunities — to play through their own missed shots and dumb turnovers and defensive mistakes — just because others are struggling.
So far, it simply hasn’t worked out like that.
A new Kentucky basketball?
This season’s team might provide a sign of whether or not UK’s basketball program is finally set on a path to more roster continuity moving forward.
Calipari will always sign sure-thing one-and-done players — and he should, if he can — but the key will be bringing in some lesser-ranked prospects that are OK with the idea of sticking around at Kentucky for two or three or even four seasons; and players that are OK with the idea that it might take some time to get serious minutes and carve out a meaningful role on game days.
As it stands, it looks like Dontaie Allen, Devin Askew, Cam’Ron Fletcher, Jacob Toppin and Lance Ware should all be back next season. Keion Brooks probably belongs on that list, as well, unless he comes off his current injury looking like an All-American in the coming weeks. Should is the operative word here. Until it happens, it probably shouldn’t be expected.
But, if all of those Cats return, that’s six scholarship players back. Maybe some of those players stick around for a year or two beyond that, along with Nolan Hickman and Bryce Hopkins and whoever else UK adds to its 2021 class.
It seems the optimal recruiting mixture for Kentucky — one many fans want to see — consists of a couple of top-10ish prospects, two or three guys ranked between 25th and 75th nationally, with a talented Kentucky kid thrown in every year or two.
For the most part, that seems to be the way UK’s recruiting is trending. The next couple of seasons should show whether or not that mixture can work, both for the on-court results that UK fans and Calipari demand, and for the roster continuity that this program clearly needs.
Getting players, for Calipari, might be the easy part. Getting them to stay has been a tougher task. Attempting to transform the perceived narrative of the program — and telling kids, straight up, from the get-go, that it’s OK to stick around — might be the best option, if that’s what Calipari truly wants.
If the NCAA actually (and seriously) changes its name, image and likeness rules — allowing players to earn money while playing college ball — that could act as a silver bullet of sorts for Kentucky, a market stacked with earning potential that could allow future UK players to make considerable cash while continuing to develop and improve their pro stock before entering the NBA Draft.
The pieces are in place for this to be the team that begins a new era of Kentucky basketball, and other pieces seem to be falling into place to help sustain such a transformation.
We’ll see if it actually happens.
This story was originally published December 18, 2020 at 7:38 AM.
