Kentucky point guard target is a ‘bright light’ on the court. ‘Jaden is special.’
The second season of high school basketball couldn’t have gone much better for Jaden Bradley.
The star point guard led Cannon School (N.C.) to its first state championship since 2006. He was named North Carolina’s player of the year at just 16 years old. MaxPreps.com honored him as a national first-team all-sophomore performer. The school year included scholarship offers from North Carolina and Kansas and several other high-major colleges.
Still, Bradley wanted something more. He liked his school and his coaches and his teammates and living in the Charlotte area — after he and his family had moved there from Rochester, N.Y., while Bradley was in middle school — but his ultimate basketball goals demanded more immediate growth.
Over the summer, Bradley revealed that he would transfer to IMG Academy, a Florida prep school that has become one of the premier basketball programs in the country.
“He just felt like it was a marathon for him and his development,” his father, Nathan Bradley, told the Herald-Leader. “He wanted to make sure that when he stepped foot on a college campus that he was going to be ready to play. That it wasn’t going to be a situation where he hadn’t played against the top guys in the country. That it wasn’t going to be a situation where he wasn’t going to be bigger, stronger, fast enough to be able to compete effectively.”
Back home in North Carolina, the five-star point guard spent his days going from school to practice to a strength coach to a skill coach. Now at IMG, all of that is under one roof. And he’s playing against a national schedule alongside several teammates who will soon join him in the ranks of high-major college basketball (and possibly, beyond that, the NBA).
With things coming relatively easy to Bradley as a high school sophomore, he decided he wanted to challenge himself.
“In his words, ‘Make himself uncomfortable.’ He felt pretty comfortable in this environment,” his dad said. “I think he’s done that, being surrounded by other players who are just as good. Every day, they compete. Two or three times a day, they’re in the gym.”
It didn’t take long for Bradley — the No. 9 overall player in the 2022 class, according to the 247Sports composite rankings — to settle in at his new school.
IMG head coach Sean McAloon said the expectations of the program — ranked annually among the top five in the country — are laid out to prospective players even before they arrive on campus. There’s a blueprint in place — from an education, skill, strength, nutrition and discipline perspective — and there are plenty of recent examples of players who have followed that path and gone on to great success in college, later to be drafted into the NBA.
McAloon said that path is presented to his players, and they have to decide on their own how good they’re going to be. “We’re not going to beg you. You have to be a self-starter,” he tells them.
“And he’s bought into everything,” McAloon said of Bradley. “From extra time in the gym to extra time in the film room to his weight sessions to his nutrition. We’re fortunate here that there’s a nice platform for that to be done, and he’s bought in wholeheartedly.
“He’s very businesslike in what he wants. The kid wants to be really, really good. He wants to be one of the best players out there. He wants to contribute immediately to a college, and — like anybody else — he has the dream of getting to the NBA.”
Contagious unselfishness
Bradley averaged 23 points per game as a sophomore last season, but — with several five-star teammates around him at IMG — he has changed his approach. His father joked that he might be averaging more assists than points through the first few games of his junior campaign.
That’s not a bad thing. In fact, that’s the way Bradley seems to prefer it. And it doesn’t mean he’s lost any of his ability to put points on the scoreboard.
“The point guard position is getting skewed a lot in the last couple of years,” McAloon said. “Everybody thinks that if you can bring the ball up the court and score at a crazy clip, then you’re a point guard. And he’s the only one I’ve seen in the last couple of years — maybe the last 10 years — that can do both, and do it at a very high clip. Meaning he knows when and where to get people involved, but he also knows that there’s times where he has to impose his will, scoring-wise.
“Because of his unselfishness, though, it rubs off on everybody else. And we’ve become a significantly better passing team because of him. We’re able to move the ball a lot faster because of him. We get the ball up the floor a lot faster because of him. And he moves it with the pass more than just the dribble. More often than not, he makes the right decision, and it adds up to where somebody else feels good about themselves. And because they feel good, they’re willing to spread that feeling to somebody else.”
Getting several highly touted guys to buy into one system and one shared goal is often the toughest part of coaching at a place like IMG, McAloon said. Every one of his players has lofty goals and professional aspirations. Even in high school, the building of brands has begun, and individual ambition sometimes takes over.
“And your job is to … try to still teach them that, if your team is doing well and everyone’s doing really well within your team, then people notice,” he said. “Especially people on the next level. Especially people on the level after that. They don’t want to see a guy go out there and just chuck for 30 if four guys are wide-open.”
This season, Bradley has made his job easier.
“He’s been a bright light for our group,” McAloon said.
Kentucky offer
The scholarship offer that Kentucky Coach John Calipari extended to Bradley last week might have surprised in its timing, but it was considered to be a foregone conclusion by those who have closely followed UK’s pursuit of the talented point guard.
Wildcats assistant coach Joel Justus visited Bradley before his sophomore season, and UK has remained in regular contact with his family ever since. Bradley clearly had the mindset and talent to play at Kentucky, but the thinking was that UK’s coaches — unable to see him in person for nearly a year due to COVID-19 restrictions — were hoping to check him out once recruiting travel was allowed, and then the offer would come.
Bradley’s father said a few days before UK offered that he was totally fine with that time frame, so he was surprised when the offer came on Jan. 3. He implied later that night that the timing was due, in part, to what IMG’s coaches had been telling Kentucky’s staff about Bradley on and off the court.
McAloon said he and his coaches have a “great relationship” with Lucas and that he has personally known Justus for about a decade dating back to the UK assistant’s tenure as a high school coach. Like all college coaches that call to check on recruits, the UK coaches wanted an honest assessment of Bradley, on and off the floor.
McAloon’s honest response?
“Jaden is special,” he said. “That’s really what it comes down to. He’s not afraid to get coached hard, and he’s not afraid to put in work, and he’s not afraid to try and be the best. Whatever questions they asked, we answered honestly, because we want to make sure we’re not going to lie. But there’s not much to lie about when it comes to Jaden.”
Hearing that from the coach who is around Bradley every day — along with the already sky-high opinion UK’s coaches had of Bradley and his family — was enough to go ahead and extend the scholarship offer. Calipari told Bradley’s father that Kentucky would take his son’s commitment whenever they were ready.
They’re not there quite yet. Bradley wants to concentrate on closing out his junior season and continuing his development — and his father said that recent speculation that a commitment might be imminent is incorrect — but there are plans to sit down as a family around April and take a closer look at his recruitment. It wouldn’t be a surprise if a commitment came shortly after that (and there are already high-level Crystal Ball predictions coming in for the Wildcats).
Kentucky already appears loaded on point guards for the near future, with Devin Askew likely to return next season, possible multi-year playmaker Nolan Hickman signed for next season, five-star point guard Skyy Clark committed for 2022 (and possible to reclassify to 2021) as well as other talented lead guards like Hunter Sallis on the Cats’ radar. This is all especially relevant since Bradley is also keeping the door open on a possible move to the 2021 class.
Would that make for too crowded a backcourt in Lexington?
Bradley’s father says no, that his son can play with other great point guards. Bradley’s coach said the same, cutting off a question on the subject and quickly summarizing what he has seen from the IMG newcomer over the past few months.
“You could put him anywhere on the court,” McAloon said, “and he would make your team better.”
