The way Mark Pope is dealing with Kentucky basketball’s injuries goes beyond plug-and-play
I once heard an old football coach say that when a team loses an important player, it doesn’t take the coaches off the hook. It puts them on the hook.
I asked Kentucky basketball coach Mark Pope about that this week.
After all, he is going through exactly that right here, right now, with starting point guard Lamont Butler being sidelined by a shoulder injury, with Butler’s backup Kerr Kriisa being out since Dec. 7 after foot surgery, and with now starting shooting guard Jaxson Robinson missing time with a wrist injury.
Beyond the emotions of losing key players — senior players — it’s a challenge for a Kentucky coaching staff searching for answers.
“There are so many variables,” Pope said Thursday before his team traveled to Austin to play Texas on Saturday. “You get to know your team. You get to understand your team. And then you get to know your team in different environments, against different styles of play, against different opponents, against different matchups, all those things.”
And then all of a sudden, the variables change. Backup center Brandon Garrison misses a game with a minor injury. Starting forward Andrew Carr misses time while battling back problems.
“So the most unsettling thing for a coach when you’re having roster turnover is you kind of have to reinvent, and you’re not even sure exactly which parts you have to reinvent,” Pope said. “You’re making your best guess. But you don’t have any data points. Sometimes you get surprised. It’ll be like, ‘Man, of all the things I thought I was going to have to reinvent, I didn’t think it was going to be this little space.’
“That’s the beauty of the season. Over the course of the season, you’re gathering more information about your guys, about how they function, how they are in different environments, at home, on the road, in neutral, how they are against a team with pressure, against a team with a ton of size, against a team that’s super-skilled that shoots it well. So you’re taking all this information and it just adds to the variables, which is fun.”
How fun is it when you lose two players at one position, as has been the case with point guards Butler and Kerr? Or when Robinson, a player you moved over to point guard, goes down, as well? Or your taking a freshman known as a scorer in Travis Perry and handing him more ball handling responsibilities?
“It’s getting new guys in new situations,” Pope said. “One of the things that’s really challenged us is even though it maybe has been one position, the loss of one position has made everybody play a different position than where your originally first doing data collection. It makes it fun. You have a chance and a necessity to be super creative. And also discovering the guys that are having growing responsibilities, kind of helping them through the process of the new responsibilities that they’re going to carry.”
It’s a lot. It’s a lot for the coaches, who are also busy with recruiting and scouting and film study and a million other things. It’s a lot for the players, who must adjust on the fly to all things new. It’s never as simple as plug-and-play.
“We spent a lot of time today whittling down our playbook,” Pope said of his coaches’ meetings. “(We’re) reevaluating, for example, how we can in our offense have different ways we’re not demanding too much information where are our guys are not having to think too much on the court because that’s never great for the way we play. But also where they can be successful in really a limited kind of game plan, play-call sheet.”
It’s coaching. For someone like Pope, who often approaches the game and the job from an intellectual level, it’s part of what makes the job worth doing.
“It’s part of the game,” the coach said. “It’s not an anomaly. It’s part of what you go through every single season. It’s intellectually challenging and stimulating and it’s emotionally taxing and fantastic. It’s great. It’s good stuff.”
This story was originally published February 14, 2025 at 10:51 AM.
