It’s Time for Calipari to Change Course

Has Coach K taken down Calipari?

This afternoon Kentucky announced that sophomore guard, Quade Green, will transfer. Green was the latest in the string of Five Star recruits that made Lexington their temporary home. Unlike most of his highly touted predecessors, Green isn’t leaving for the NBA draft, he’s leaving for another school.

The Wildcats are starting the early signs of taking a step back. Deny it all you want but you’ll be right here in a couple of seasons. You just don’t know it yet. In the last three seasons we’ve seen the Wildcats slide backwards. The last three seasons we’ve seen a second round exit (loss to Indiana), regional finals exit (lost to North Carolina), and regional semifinals loss (Kansas State). On the surface you can say there’s no shame in any of the losses but only the one to North Carolina is understandable.

Coach John Calipari has always been in the cross-hairs of fans and John Chaney. Some has centered around schools that he coached going on probation (UMass and Memphis). In both cases, he wasn’t implicated but that’s widely ignored.

Most dislike him because, fair or unfair, he’s seen as the poster child of the “One and Done”. Not only was Calipari one of the first coaches to embrace the concept, he successfully took a traditional program and built a program around it. That spawned a generation of disingenuous “what about the children” rhetoric. Kentucky was college basketball’s “Evil Empire”. But lets be real, do you want a bunch of “one and done’s” or Billy Gillespie? Yeah… that’s what I thought.

This was the classic case of the “who” not the “what”. How do I know? Because there seems to be a completely different reaction now that Duke is the face of the “One and Done”. Instead of a bunch of “what about the children”, it’s the latest dunk by Zion Williamson. Apparently Coach Mike Krzyzewski and Duke are the right face. As Coach K has leveraged his USA Basketball ties, recruits that would have ended up in Lexington are now ending up in Durham. This isn’t an attack on Coach K’s built in advantages with USA Basketball. He has two of the most recognizable logos on his business card. He’s earned those logos and everything that comes with it.

This has come at the expense of Calipari. Yes. Duke and Kentucky have pretty much been one and two on the recruiting trail but when you watch those teams on the court, do they look like one and two? And that’s where the disconnect is. If Kentucky’s recruiting classes are so close to Duke’s, why don’t they look like they’re close to Duke? It goes beyond the game earlier this year. When it comes to  Duke, you feel like they’ll just reload with players who will make immediate contributions next season. Do you get that impression with Kentucky? I don’t.

So now is the time for Kentucky to turn a negative into a positive. Recruit kids who will be there for more than a season. Now, it doesn’t have to be every kid in the recruiting class but get a couple of kids who are good three year prospects. You know who has done this? You guessed it, Roy Williams. If you look at Williams’ national championship teams at North Carolina, they were full of experience with a sprinkle of youth. In fact, the Heels have struggled this year because they have youth playing major minutes at key positions. They’ll be successful but not too many people will tell you they can see this team playing on the final weekend of the season.

Kentucky could easily do the same. Instead of trying to live on supposed “one-and-done’s” that Duke doesn’t get, put together a class that you can depend on for two years. And, no, that doesn’t mean the player comes in as a “one-and-done” and then realizes that they aren’t a “one-and-done”. There are top kids who expect to be where they are for two to three years.

Five of the last six National Champions have had experience in key positions. Louisville (2013), Connecticut (2014), Villanova (2016), North Carolina (2017) and Villanova (2018). The only team that wasn’t chocked full of experience was the 2015 Duke Blue Devils. But they had the benefit of playing Wisconsin and we all know the basketball gods weren’t going to let a team running the Swing Offense cut down the nets while singing “One Shining Moment”.

So now is the time for Calipari to shock the world again. Turn the original One-and-Done U into Two-and-Three U. Now is the time to change courses.

 

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