Star basketball recruit Adem Bona picks UCLA over Kentucky. Where does UK turn now?
Five-star big man Adem Bona is headed to UCLA, and Kentucky has now struck out with its top frontcourt targets in the 2022 basketball recruiting class.
Bona — a 6-foot-11 center from Nigeria and currently a high school senior at Prolific Prep (Calif.) — announced his commitment to UCLA on Monday, picking the Bruins over Kentucky after taking recruiting trips to both schools in October and hosting UK Coach John Calipari for three visits in California over the past several weeks.
Ranked by 247Sports as the No. 10 overall prospect in the 2022 class, Bona earned a Kentucky scholarship offer during the summer and emerged a couple of months ago as the Wildcats’ top frontcourt option to finish out this recruiting class.
Bona was already high on UK’s target board even before fellow five-star center Dereck Lively II announced his commitment to Duke over Kentucky in September, and the Wildcats were assumed by many to be the frontrunners for Bona after they lost out on Lively’s recruitment.
Instead, the Bruins made a major move for the in-state high school standout. He joins a UCLA class that already includes combo guard Amari Bailey (the No. 3 overall prospect in 2022) and point guard Dylan Andrews, a top-50 player in the class.
So, where does Kentucky go from here in its search for more frontcourt help for next season?
“They’ll go to the transfer portal,” 247Sports analyst Travis Branham told the Herald-Leader. “There aren’t many bigs left out there in this class. And where Kentucky currently stands, they don’t need to go out scrambling for another big man on the high school level. Now you can just wait and feel out who’s going to be coming back.”
Bona’s decision Monday leaves just five of the top 25 recruits in the 2022 class uncommitted — with the early signing period now a little more than a week away — and only one of those prospects, Yohan Traore, is a center.
Traore — a 6-10 center for Dream City Christian (Ariz.) — enjoyed a meteoric rise in the recruiting rankings over the summer. He climbed all the way to No. 4 overall on the Rivals.com list for 2022, and he’s still considering several schools, though there’s been nothing to link him to Kentucky and no sign that the Wildcats will jump into his recruitment.
“There was some interest there, but it never gained any legs,” Branham said of any possible Kentucky-Traore connection.
UK is already flush with backcourt talent for next season, thanks to early commitments from five-star point guard Skyy Clark, five-star shooting guard Shaedon Sharpe and five-star wing Chris Livingston. Five-star combo guard Cason Wallace is planning to announce a college decision this weekend, and he, too, is expected to pick the Wildcats.
All four of those players are five-star recruits, with Livingston and Wallace ranked inside the top 10 nationally and Sharpe widely considered to be the No. 1 overall prospect in the 2022 class.
What Kentucky doesn’t have is an instant-impact big man for next season, and it might be a while before that changes.
UK added four transfers over the past year for this season’s team, and Calipari addressed his pivot toward looking at the NCAA transfer portal for more recruits at the team’s media day a couple of weeks ago. He acknowledged that, for this particular season, it made more sense to go after established, veteran college players to bolster the Wildcats’ roster.
Calipari also made clear that — if immediate contributions are needed — he’d prefer to take such a player over an inexperienced high school recruit who might be in over his head as a freshman.
“We recruit really good players and then they leave right away. We’ll deal with it,” the UK coach said. “What’s the best thing? For this team, we needed a couple more players. So, when you looked around, do you really want to bring somebody here that’s not quite good enough, that’s going to really struggle here?”
As Branham said, there’s no need for Calipari to go scrambling after a lesser-ranked high school recruit at this stage in the cycle.
It’s also still unclear just how much Kentucky will need more frontcourt help for next year.
While it seems unlikely that all three of their big men — Oscar Tshiebwe, Daimion Collins and Lance Ware — will return beyond this season, that could still be possible.
Collins is projected as a first-round selection in the 2022 NBA Draft, but there’s no guarantee he’ll leave Kentucky after this season. Tshiebwe and Ware are not currently projected as picks in next year’s draft.
So, expect Calipari and the UK coaching staff to keep tabs on possible transfers over the next few months while also gauging the likelihood that their current frontcourt players could return for another season.
Over the past few seasons, Kentucky has been able to land instant-impact bigs like Reid Travis, Olivier Sarr and Tshiebwe through the transfer portal, and all-American center Kofi Cockburn looked like a real possibility at one point this offseason.
If there’s a clear need for a post player at UK after this season, the Cats should be well-positioned to pounce on the best available frontcourt options.
“So you start feeling that out, and you start looking at the portal to bring in another guy like Oscar Tshiebwe, potentially,” Branham said. “Or maybe another guy like a Kofi Cockburn ends up in the portal, where you can jump on them.”
