When the Wizard of Westwood talked, you listened. When John Wooden, arguably the king of college basketball coaches and the architect of one of the greatest dynasties in all of sports, offered advice, you took it. John Calipari did so in 2010 after his first season at Kentucky when he called the late UCLA coach to ask him about his team. Wooden told Coach Cal that that he played too many guys. He advised Calipari to play six, seven or eight guys – at most – in his rotation.  And so for the next few years at UK, Coach Cal heeded Wooden’s advice and played a small rotation. In the 2010-11 season, Calipari’s first team after that phone call, just six guys averaged double-figure minutes. The next year – Kentucky’s national championship season – only six guys played more than 12 minutes a game.The rotation has slightly expanded over the last two seasons with seven or eight guys getting significant minutes, but Coach Cal, at least during his time at UK, has never been one to unload his bench. Yanking five guys at one time when a he saw something he didn’t like just wasn’t Calipari’s style.”All kinds of ways of doing this,” Coach Cal said last season.It’s just a big rotation wasn’t one of them.But if you’ve watched Calipari enough during his time at UK and studied his on-court philosophies, the one thing you may have noticed is that he has no set-in-stone philosophy. Sure, from a recruiting standpoint, he’s labeled as the coach who perfected the Dribble Drive Motion Offense, but how many times in Calipari’s five seasons in Lexington have you actually seen his teams run the Dribble Drive?Instead of sticking to one style, Calipari has adjusted his style to fit the needs of his teams. He likes to play to his players’ strengths. In 2010, with a team that Coach Cal has said wasn’t a great executing group, he did a lot of posting up with bigs like DeMarcus Cousins, Patrick Patterson and Daniel Orton. The following year, with Brandon Knight, Terrence Jones and Josh Harrellson starring in the offense, the strength of the team was hand-offs. The title team was a strong pick-and-roll group.The point is, the best description of Calipari’s coaching style is that he has no coaching style. If one had to label his method, it’s his adaptability. He changes to fit what best suits his team.That brings us back to that conversation with Wooden. When Calipari had that conversation with the legendary coach four years ago, he adapted the notion because it worked for those particular teams. With so much roster turnover due to the NBA Draft every year, Coach Cal’s teams, while supremely talented, weren’t overly deep. And then this last offseason happened and the model was blown up. A perfect storm that featured a disappointing regular season, a magical run to the national championship game and continued success on the recruiting trail has created an unlikely scenario for the 2014-15 season. When players who undoubtedly could have gone in the NBA Draft announced they were coming back to join another heralded recruiting class, it created unparalleled depth.Coach Cal not only had a starting lineup of McDonald’s All-Americans, he essentially had two rotations of Burger Boys at his disposal. So, as he rhetorically asked himself in a post on CoachCal.com in the middle of September, how does everybody eat when so many want to sit at the dinner table? How does he keep 12 guys who are all capable of playing and making an impact happy?

The trip to the Bahamas may have provided the answer. Going against everything he’s ever done as the coach at Kentucky, Calipari and his assistants employed a two-platoon system comprised mainly of 10 players (remember, Willie Cauley-Stein and Trey Lyles were unavailable because of offseason procedures).”The players are bought into it,” Coach Cal said in a preseason roundtable interview with local reporters last month. “They liked it. They all thought it was terrific.”How could they not? With the exception of a couple late-game situations where a player or two stayed on the floor, the coaching staff stuck with the same two teams and split the minutes almost dead even. Whenever a TV timeout would roll around – every four minutes – no matter how well the unit on the floor was playing, it was out with one platoon and in with the next.Perhaps more surprising than Calipari’s persistence to stick with the two-platoon look throughout the trip was just how well the system actually worked. The Wildcats overwhelmed their three professional opponents with talent, depth and a constant motor. Aware they would play just four minutes at a time, the players seemed to play at a high level at all times, making it harder for the thinner rosters and older players to keep up.”It just showed how much talent we have,” Andrew Harrison said. “From the first group to the second group, it showed different people are better at different things and stuff like that. It was a great concept. I liked it.”UK won its first five games by an average of 20.2 points. The Cats’ only loss was in the final game against the Dominican Republic national team when legs were tired and minds were set on returning home. And oh, by the way, that Dominican team, which beat Kentucky on a buzzer beater, went on to the round of 16 just a few weeks later at the FIBA World Cup.The success of the two-platoon system in the Bahamas turned what looked to be nothing more than preseason experiment into the regular-season model for 2014-15. As Calipari outlined in that post on this website a few weeks ago and confirmed on Monday at a tip-off luncheon in Louisville, he’s now dead set on using it and making this a “watershed” year at Kentucky.In his sixth year at UK, Coach Cal is out to prove that this many talented guys can play together, sacrifice their minutes for one other, win, and still benefit personally. If it works, Calipari wrote, “There will be no going back. No player will ever worry about who else is in the program or who may stay.””It’s never been done before where the players have benefited,” Coach Cal said last month. “It’s been done where the program’s benefited and the coaches benefited, but it’s never been done before where players benefited. That’s the challenge that we’ll have. I think that if you can get two groups that are balanced yet good enough, we can do it.”Legendary coach coach Dean Smith ran a version of the platoon system at North Carolina, though his method was slightly different. Smith stuck with a seven- or eight-man rotation, but he would bring in what he called his “blue team” for occasional five-minute stretches.What Calipari is trying to do, even he hasn’t done it before, so he pleaded for patience with the fan base on Monday. “Listen, folks, I have never coached this way,” Coach Cal said. “I haven’t. But I’m going to. And I’m studying and I’m doing everything I can to make this work so every one of these kids eats. And it’s not going to be easy.”Calipari has fallen in love with the two-platoon system because of its versatility and its ability to include guys who have all earned the right to play.”I’d love to play that way because it includes 10 guys, and really it includes all 12 because even the two that are left, you’re in the rotation of injury, somebody getting hurt,” he said. “If a guard’s not playing well, you’re in. If a big’s not playing well, you’re in. So everybody is into the rotation.”The issue going forward becomes how the players will handle what Calipari has called the “clutter of the ego.”How will players who started and played 30 minutes a game last season handle 20 minutes a game this year? How will five-star freshmen react to coming off the bench and playing 17 or 18 minutes instead of the 25 to 30 they may have gotten at another school? What happens when a player who is capable of scoring 25 in any given night is only getting five or six shots a game? What about when people outside the team circle start chirping about how someone should be getting more of this and more of that?Inevitably, those things are going to come up during the season. Calipari and the Cats will likely have to deal with at least some of those issues as the season wears on.  It’s how they deal with them that could determine the outcome of the year and pave the way for that watershed moment Coach Cal is hoping for. “You have to sit back and say there are two things: I want to win a championship and I want to be drafted in the highest position I can be. Can that all happen two platooning? Yes, it can, but it’ll be a challenge,” Calipari said. “No one has ever done it.”One thing Coach Cal and his staff will stress with the team to get it to buy into the two-platoon concept is the efficiency of it. “Does Michael Jordan in a 40-minute game really have to be out there 32 minutes to show you he can play? Or LeBron (James) or (Carmelo) Anthony?” Calipari said. “You’re watching this USA team (at the FIBA World Cup), guys are getting 21, 20 minutes, and you know who can play, who the better players are.”To get his guys to understand that you don’t need to play a full game to show NBA scouts what you are capable of, the coaching staff will provide the players with stats that show what their averages would be if they played 34 minutes a game. Why not 40? Because, as Coach Cal explained, even the best players in the country only play between 32 and 34 minutes.”For 20 minutes you just play and if doesn’t work I’m saying it’s (my fault) anyway,” Calipari said.When the Bahamas statistics are translated to a 34-minute outing, the numbers are pretty staggering.

To this point, the players have bought in. Each individual player met with Coach Cal after the Bahamas trip and said he liked the system.”This is a team that each guy is comfortable in their own skin, which means they don’t have to be jealous, they don’t have to be resentful,” Calipari said. “They just, I’m happy with how I’m playing and happy with how he’s playing.”If anything, Calipari said, playing 20 minutes a game as opposed to 35 boosts the numbers because some guys can’t play at that high of a level for that long. At 20, they can.”The clutter is going to say, ‘Ah, you can’t prove yourself in 20.’ Well, some guys need 35 minutes to play 20,” Calipari said. What UK didn’t reveal in the Bahamas – with the exception of a couple of late-game situations – is how the two-platoon system could mix and match different players. By and large, the two platoons in the Bahamas stayed the same through all six games, but Calipari said that might not be the case in the regular season.”You’ve got to have a team that, say someone’s really hurting us in a zone and we say, ‘OK, we’re putting our best shooting team in,’ so we’re mixing it up,” Calipari said. “Well, you practice that way. It’s not like you just did it in that game. What about a team, we get down, we’re just playing bad and we just want a catch-up team in there? What would that catch-up team be? Because you’ve got to both defend and score. What would a team look like if you just wanted it to be a great defensive team? Would it be Willie, Marcus Lee and another big and two guards who are all guarding? What would that team be? What if you needed another pressing team? Who would your best pressing team be? And that may be your catch-up team. So all that stuff will be decided as we practice. I don’t even know what the groupings would be.”Adding Cauley-Stein and Lyles into the two-platoon mix makes it seem like the possibilities are endless.”You can play Willie and then could have Alex staying at four or Trey Lyles staying at four,” Calipari said. “With a big, you could have Willie there with Karl, who can shoot it better, and Marcus Lee. How about that team? Now all of a sudden it’s nutty.”Nutty and groundbreaking.