Molding a Team: UK’s Inexperience Gives Calipari a Blank Canvas

Kentucky head coach John Calipari has a list of excuses he’s heard many times throughout his Hall of Fame career, so he writes each of them out on a board to try to save everybody’s time.
 
There’s the classic excuse that involves the player’s girlfriend. There’s the “I’m sick” excuse. Perhaps the player is a little banged up and wants to use that as a crutch more than actual crutches.
 
In total, Calipari will write out 10 of these excuses on the board and number each of them. When a player needs or wants to use one, Coach Cal tells him to pick a number.
 
“Look, I don’t have time to hear your whole excuse. Just give me a number,” Calipari will say to the player. “Then I’ll tell them you can give me combinations. You can give me a three-five. It doesn’t matter, but I don’t need a whole sentence. Just give me a number so we can move on.”
 
Such is life for the head coach who oftentimes is leading one of the youngest teams in the country. In 2017-18, Calipari will be leading the youngest team of his Hall of Fame career.
 
Kentucky lost each of its top seven scorers from last season’s Elite Eight group. Together, they accounted for 92.6 percent of the Wildcats’ points. Similarly, more than 76 percent of Kentucky’s rebounding is gone.
 
Those stats not enough?
 
How about the fact that Kentucky will have to replace 88.3 percent of its minutes from a season ago? Eight of the Wildcats’ top nine players in terms of minutes played are gone, including each of their top six.
 
Kentucky’s leading returner is sophomore forward Wenyen Gabriel, who averaged a modest 4.6 points and 4.8 rebounds in 17.8 minutes per game last season. The good news for Coach Cal and the young Wildcats is the rangy wing appears to have gone through a bit of a transformation upon returning to campus from over the summer.
 
He’s lost weight but added muscle and changed his mindset on the floor after showing promise at times as a freshman but also growing pains. Those struggles appeared most at the end of the season when he played just 8.4 minutes per game and scored five total points in seven postseason games.
 
“Wenyen is playing way better, thank God,” Calipari said. “So, he’s not the same guy he was a year ago. So that one guy you have coming back, you know, he can be in that rotation and be fine. The other guys seem to be freshmen.”
 
And with so many of those freshmen – seven to be exact, plus Hamidou Diallo, who joined the Wildcats in January last season but did not play – joining a roster lacking in returning experience, Coach Cal has a bit of a blank canvas at his hands. What he decides to figuratively paint on that canvas is what everyone is eager to see, including himself.
 
“For me, it’s going to be if we’re doing new things offensively, if we’re playing away from the ball different than we have, the good news is none of these guys know,” he said. “It’s not like I have a whole team and we’re trying to change how we play. It’s a new canvas. This is what I want this to look like. And I’m not sure if it’ll be right. We’ll try it.”
 
With such great height and versatility on this year’s roster, Calipari has reached out to friends of his in the NBA to pick their brains on different ways of playing. As Coach Cal has mentioned so many times before, the game is becoming more and more positionless. His incoming class, on paper, looks to be as positionless as any he has had in his first eight seasons at UK.
 
In addition to the 6-foot-9 Gabriel, there’s 6-9 Kevin Knox and 6-9 Jarred Vanderbilt. Both freshmen can handle and pass the ball, especially Vanderbilt, who is as difficult to peg to a certain position as there is. (Unfortunately for the Wildcats, Vanderbilt went down with a left foot injury Friday and will miss the first three months of the season.) Then there’s the 6-7 PJ Washington, who can and does bang in the post with anyone thanks to his build, relentless nature and freakish wingspan.
 
“The biggest thing is last year we had like three point guards on the floor almost all the time,” Coach Cal said. “Now, you’re going to have either one or none that are like true point guards. That’s going to be the biggest change. You may have a team of where it seems basketball is going to: No point guard, no center, just players.”
 
Six-foot freshman Quade Green is Kentucky’s “true” point guard this season. There’s also Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who is more than capable of running the point, but at 6-6 and with a rangy wingspan he offers other possibilities as well.
 
Gilgeous-Alexander, the pleasant “surprise” of the summer workouts and practices, according to nearly all of his teammates, has an “old man’s game,” as his head coach says. With his length he can get around players, get to the basket and is fueled by a top-notch work ethic.
 
Green, a gritty, competitive player from Philadelphia, often draws comparisons to former All-America Kentucky point guard Tyler Ulis. Yes, they’re both undersized, but the comparisons also stem from their on-court demeanor.
 
“He runs the floor like Tyler runs the floor,” Calipari said of Green. “I’m not comparing him to Tyler because that wouldn’t be fair to him. But he runs the court like Tyler did.”
 
In high school and AAU play, Calipari said Green was more of a “walk-it-up kind of point guard.” Knowing how much pace matters at Kentucky in order to get more possessions for all of their weapons – and to keep everybody happy – Coach Cal told Green that if he wants to play at UK he needs to pick up the pace. Green has taken that message to heart.
 
“I said to the team, ‘I didn’t know you (Quade) were this fast,’ ” Calipari recalled telling the team. “And you know what his comment was? ‘I didn’t know either. I didn’t know I was this fast either.’ And then I said, ‘Why are you playing like this?’ He said, ‘Because you told me, and you told me if I didn’t I wouldn’t play.’
 
“That’s good for the other guys to hear, like, I told him you’re not going to play now. So, the rest of you understand, you’re going to play the way you have to play for you and us to be on that floor. I don’t care where you came, what game you were in, doesn’t matter to me.”
 
Outside of the lack of experience, the biggest knock on this team entering the season is the supposed lack of outside shooting. Gone is senior forward Derek Willis, who over the past two seasons, especially, helped the Wildcats stretch defenses as a stretch four.
 
Freshman guard Jemarl Baker steps on campus as the most accomplished outside shooter, but second on that list might be Knox. Calipari has repeatedly said he looks at Knox as more of a guard than a forward, despite his height. Either way, Calipari would like Knox to drive to the basket and be more of a playmaker than Willis was ever asked to be.
 
“Derek gave us – and again, we’re totally different this year – a stretch four at 6-9. These are playmaking fours,” Calipari said. “Derek was a shooting four. That’s what he was. These guys can do it on the bounce, they’re not as good of a shooter as he was, but they can do stuff off the bounce.”
 
“How much have we played through a four the last couple years?” Calipari later asked a group of assembled media. “So, the four was (Willis) as a playmaker? (No). Alex (Poythress) as a playmaker? (No). OK, now you got playmakers. How we play to their strengths is just totally different.”
 
Among the lessons Calipari needs to incorporate with this team is how to play a zone. The combination of UK’s size and shooting being a perceived weakness really does not leave other teams many other options in how to defend the Cats.
 
“That’s what I think teams will do to us,” said Calipari of zone defenses. “I don’t think anybody is going to stretch the floor, which they haven’t most years. If they stretch the floor or try to press us it plays to our advantage.”
 
In practice, the Wildcats will be working plenty on how to attack a zone. By doing that, they will be forced to work on how to defend a zone as well. It’s not Calipari’s favorite defense – root canal may be higher on his list of preferences – but does not deny its importance to master.
 
“I think from day one we have to have a zone,” Calipari said. “So, start breaking it down, start adding it and then start working on it because we’re going to have to play against it. And if we can play against our own zone I’m going to imagine we can play against anybody else’s.”
 
There are also a few other areas involving less X’s and O’s that Calipari will have to teach his team. Among those subjects is their mentality on the court, how to practice, communication and how to be a leader.
 
Calipari said freshmen often play with a mindset that “exchanging baskets” is fine. It’s a product of being the best players on their high school teams and taking all the shots. Now it’s time to hit the reset button and teach them how to win.
 
That mentality begins in practice. But first Calipari is teaching them how to go about practice. As he says, many players will go into practice and shoot differently each time because they’re not as dialed in. Then when the games come around they’re shooting at a moving target of sorts. Calipari is working with his players to become more consistent in their approach, which involves elevating the same way on every shot they take.
 
“It doesn’t always go in, but it is exactly the same shot,” Calipari said. “And they work on shooting exactly the same shot so it’s more muscle memory than mental memory. If it’s mental memory, you will go mental. If it’s muscle memory, you have amnesia because you’re not thinking about it.”
 
Calipari asked his players what stood out the most when the New Orleans Pelicans were in Lexington to train over the summer. The answer was short and succinct: They talk. Talking on the court, and making that a habit, is the hardest thing for young players to do, he said.
 
Green is a strong choice to be one of the Wildcats’ most vocal players on the court. Green isn’t afraid to tell his teammates what he’s looking for from them, but says he expects the same in return.
 
Gabriel, being the most experienced Wildcat, has widely been assumed to be this year’s leader. That very well may be true, but Calipari said Diallo needs to be one of the leaders for this team, which means he has to “serve them.” After nearly going pro following one semester on the bench last season, Calipari said he talked to Diallo about what it means to be a leader.
 
“That’s all new to these guys,” Calipari said. “(Sports psychologist) Bob Rotella tells me all the time, you gotta teach ’em how to lead. If you want them to lead you gotta teach ’em because if you think they know that you’re crazy. They don’t.”
 
Ultimately, and especially with so many new players, each player will dictate what their role is on the team this season by their performance, approach and attitude, among other things. Returners won’t be given minutes and the highly rated 2017 recruiting class won’t get on the court simply because of the number of stars beside their name.
 
At Kentucky, Calipari says, players must be “willing to carve out their own space.” The reason being is they aren’t the only guy at their position trying to achieve what they’re trying to achieve. Many of these players have always been the best player on their own team. Now, they’re one of many, and for the freshmen, it’s all starting from scratch.
 
“None of the guys are where they need to be,” Calipari said. “This is going to be one of those season-long – we’ve been through it before, it’s hard. It’s hard to be patient for me and our fans and everybody else, but you’re just going to have to be because we’re not even going to know exactly how we’re going to be playing in February and March. We won’t. But we’re talented. We got a great group of kids.”