Kentucky or the pros? Calipari lays out his pitch to elite basketball recruits.
In his first extended comments since the end of a disastrous 2020-21 season, on the heels of a major coaching shakeup, a busy spring of roster turnover and amid an ever-changing college basketball landscape, John Calipari acknowledged that professional leagues have become a major recruiting rival.
“The kids they’re going after are the kids that we would recruit,” Calipari said Friday morning in a lengthy interview with local reporters.
This college basketball offseason has been yet another filled with talented high school players opting for professional contracts. Since last month, three more five-star recruits — Jaden Hardy, Scoota Henderson and Mike Foster — have signed six-figure contracts with the G League’s upstart developmental program, and four additional players have joined the new Overtime Elite League.
The latest round of decisions make it 13 top-35 national prospects over the past three recruiting cycles that have gone the pro route, with 11 of those coming in the past year — and seven of those players picking the G League.
While the Overtime league will be targeting current high school players as well as recent grads, its interests are not expected to have a major, immediate impact on Kentucky’s. Early UK commitment Skyy Clark has already turned down a lucrative offer from that league, his father told the Herald-Leader last week, and it seems unlikely that Overtime will be able to sign the kind of players Kentucky normally recruits until it shows some form of stability.
The real recruiting rival, for the time being, is the G League. And top college coaches are well aware of that.
In the past, Calipari has largely taken the public stance that he ultimately ends up with the players that belong at Kentucky, somewhat dismissing the allure of pro contracts as something that shouldn’t have a huge effect on UK’s recruiting efforts. On Friday, he echoed that sentiment to a degree, but he also seemed primed for more of a fight over such prospects. And for good reason.
Hardy — the No. 1 guard in the 2021 class — was one of Calipari’s earliest recruiting targets from that group and a player that Kentucky spent ample time pursuing. The class of 2022 — the players who will be high school seniors later this year — is the group that will really make things interesting.
Rivals.com updated its 2022 rankings this week, and the top of that list was peppered with prospects expected to seriously consider the G League route, including Jalen Duren (No. 1 in the new rankings), Emoni Bates (No. 2), Chris Livingston (No. 4), Keyonte George (No. 5) and Dior Johnson (No. 7). Duren, Livingston, George and Johnson are all major Kentucky targets, and Bates would be, too, if he wasn’t considered a virtual lock to go pro straight out of high school.
That means when Calipari and UK’s assistant coaches are making their pitch to these players, they’ll be doing so knowing that there’s another option to get a deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars already on the table.
The Kentucky coach acknowledged as much Friday, and the Cats are clearly forming a plan.
Name, image and likeness
Calipari didn’t hesitate when asked how Kentucky could combat the attraction of pro money — anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 for one year, possibly more — that some of his top 2022 targets will have the option of taking over the next several months.
The UK coach immediately mentioned reforms to the NCAA’s name, image and likeness rules as a silver bullet of sorts for his basketball program to level the recruiting playing field.
“Obviously, we have to wait to see exactly what the rules state. But no one should be able to do it better than our basketball program,” Calipari said. “All that we do, and all that we can do, in my mind, it should be the best in the country.”
As he said, it’s still unclear what exactly the NCAA will do with its NIL reforms, which have now been talked about for years. Some kind of meaningful action is seemingly coming soon, but a start date for such guidelines has not been determined. There is ample state and federal legislation in the works related to the issue, as well as pending court cases, and all of that has further complicated a process that the NCAA was already slow-playing.
When the time comes that Kentucky basketball players can make money while playing for the Wildcats, it sounds like Calipari will be ready. On Friday, he teased new staff positions for the program, some of which would seemingly deal directly with name, image and likeness reforms and helping players and their families navigate the process.
That time isn’t here yet, but Calipari still thinks UK has plenty to sell to prospective recruits.
The Hall of Fame coach stressed the value of playing college basketball, in general — and playing for a blue-blood school with a rabid fan base like Kentucky, specifically — as something that should be a determining factor in a star recruit’s decision-making process.
He used former UK target Cade Cunningham as a recent example. Cunningham was the top recruit in the 2020 class and chose to play at Oklahoma State, turning down a major offer from the G League. He emerged as a major national star as a freshman, solidified his status as the No. 1 pick in this year’s NBA Draft, and likely boosted his earning potential at the next level by going the college route.
Calipari noted that he did that at Oklahoma State, teasing the even bigger possibilities that Kentucky could offer.
“Cade Cunningham, his whole — not just basketball and what it did for him — his brand, his ability to take advantage of that on the market, is through the roof,” Calipari said. “… And they’re in Stillwater, Oklahoma. And that happened for him.
“Now you think about Kentucky and what that means if that guy comes here.”
Calipari boasted that Kentucky’s pre-pandemic television ratings were on par with some of the best NBA teams’ numbers, noted the lack of general fan interest in the G League Ignite team packed with star recruits this past season, and sold the benefits — from a brand-building perspective — that come with the college game.
“You look at guys that go to another school … and all the sudden they explode,” he said. “What would have happened if they went to the pro leagues? And now their marketing dollars aren’t the same. You could lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Here’s what I keep saying: if kids want to do that … I have no problem. That’s fine. We need kids here that aren’t coming here that, ‘I’ve gotta play 35 minutes and take 35 shots. And I’ve gotta be the only guy on the team.’ That’s not our culture here and never will be. You gotta come here and fight for what you want.”
Does Kentucky need top recruits?
This past season’s 9-16 showing was obviously a major outlier in the Calipari era.
The Cats haven’t been to a Final Four since 2015, but they’ve still had plenty of success. They were a shot away from advancing to that point in two of the previous three NCAA Tournaments and could have made a run in 2020 had last year’s postseason not been canceled due to COVID-19.
Clearly, what Calipari has been doing has been working, just not quite to the degree that Kentucky fans would like. And it’s been nothing close to the dominance of those early years, when Calipari took the program from NIT status to the No. 1 ranking in a matter of months and went to four Final Fours — and won a national championship — over his first six seasons.
One of the clearest differences between those early teams and the more recent ones is the lack of star power over the past several years. From 2009 to 2014, the Cats landed nine top-five national recruits. Three of those players went on to become the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft. Eight of the nine were one-and-done NBA lottery picks, and the only one who wasn’t — Andrew Harrison — was the starting point guard on back-to-back Final Four teams.
In the seven years since, UK has landed two top-five recruits — the underwhelming Skal Labissiere and Brandon Boston — the Cats have gone six straight seasons without a Final Four, and one of UK’s key recruiters from those early Calipari days — former assistant Rod Strickland — is now working to help the G League bring in top prospects.
Orlando Antigua — perhaps the best UK recruiter of the Calipari era — was around for the entirety of that 2009-14 run and returned to Lexington this offseason as Kentucky’s top assistant. He acknowledged in his re-introductory press conference this month that “the landscape has changed” in the recruiting world since his first go-around, but that shouldn’t be taken as a concession that Kentucky won’t be targeting the top players in the future.
Everything Calipari has done this offseason — and everything he said Friday — suggests the UK coach is re-energized when it comes to recruiting and expects to once again land the very best players in the country.
Bringing back Antigua — along with the addition of Ron “Chin” Coleman, another accomplished recruiter — to join forces with current assistant Jai Lucas, who is seen as one of the rising stars in the college basketball world, was a clear sign of Calipari’s intent on the recruiting trail.
Extending scholarship offers to such players as Duren, George, Livingston and Johnson — knowing full well that all of those prospects will be looking at the G League and other pro routes as a viable option — was yet another indication that Calipari plans to go toe to toe with the pro leagues moving forward.
Recent results seem to say that for UK to return to perennial national champion contender status, the Cats need to bring in some of those players at the very top of the rankings on a regular basis.
Antigua built Kentucky’s case for such players in his comments a few weeks ago, and Calipari built upon that case even more Friday. The UK coach seemed confident that his pitch of short-term sacrifice — at least, until NIL reforms are put into place — leading to long-term success will be able to trump what the G League and other pro routes are selling.
“The kids that fight through this end up making it. And their brand is built over time,” Calipari said. “... If they look at this and the overall picture — we call it the Kentucky effect. The shoe contracts are more. The endorsements are more. You may name a player that went to college. And I say to you, ‘If he went to one of the pro leagues, what would it have done for him?’ Now they may say, ‘Well, we’re gonna build it.’ Well, I’m talking right now. Maybe in five years it’s different. But it isn’t right now.
“So, yes, they’re out there. Yes, some kids are gonna do it. And I’m fine with it. There may be kids that I’d encourage to do it. But the others that want this — we’ll be fine.”
This story was originally published May 28, 2021 at 1:07 PM.
