It’s Year 7 for University of Kentucky head men’s basketball coach John Calipari and his 2016-17 team may be the most athletic team he’s had. There’s a lot of games to be played for the Wildcats between now and the 2017 Final Four. As always, Kentucky will have young players featured prominently with returning stars. And it’s up to Coach Cal to figure out how to get everyone on the same page. The good thing is for the Big Blue Nation, there’s not a better coach in America at figuring such things out.
John Calipari gets a lot of praise for his recruiting prowess. And he should. In the era of the “one-and-dones,” no coach has brought in the amount of talent that he has. What shouldn’t get overlooked is that he not only gets talented players to sacrifice for the good of the team, he does it while winning in the most pressure packed program in the country. Coach Cal arrived in Lexington with his famed Dribble Drive offense and has yet to really run it. Why is that? Instead of making his players adapt to his system, he adapts his system to fit his players. Every single Kentucky team under Calipari has looked completely different offensively.
In 2010, with John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins featured, Cal used Cousins’ inside scoring ability with Wall (and Eric Bledsoe) on the outside to keep the offense balanced. And that team returned Kentucky to its rightful place, entering the tournament as the number one overall seed before falling in the Elite Eight.
The 2011 team had the unenviable task of following up the Wall and Boogie team. And while the regular season was rocky, Brandon Knight led the Wildcats to the Final Four for the first time since 1998’s NCAA title team. Knight and senior big man Josh Harrellson went Stockton and Malone and pick-and-rolled their way through a brutal NCAA tournament draw. Sharpshooter Doron Lamb helped to keep floor spaced while Knight and Harrellson used one of the oldest offensive sets in the book to get the Cats to Houston.
The 2012 team will be remembered for its stifling defense and with All-Everything Anthony Davis there’s no mystery why. But on the offensive end, freshman point guard Marquis Teague led the most efficient offense in the country. Davis wasn’t as offensively polished or as dominant as Cousins was, but in conjunction with Terrence Jones, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Doron Lamb and Darius Miller the Wildcats were coolly destructive from every point on the floor. And when Teague “got it” and turned Lexington into Lob City? Forget about it.
2013: Hey, we all get a mulligan.
The Tweak, or whatever it was Cal did to right the ship on a potentially disastrous 2014 campaign worked. Unleashing Andrew Harrison. Moving Julius Randle to the high post. Turning Aaron Harrison into the college basketball equivalent of Daredevil, the Shooting Guard Without Fear. Whatever it was that John Calipari did after Pat Forde told him to lay in his bed…. it worked. Personally, I think moving Randle to the high post and letting him face the basket was the biggest change for that team. For a coach known for his point guards, letting Randle be the workhorse out of the post was a stroke of genius.
Too much talent. Too many egos. There’s only one basketball. How will it work? In 2015, it was all about the Platoons. How Calipari got two teams’ worth of All Americans to play together in a platoon style system, is still a stroke of genius that only he could pull off. I know that it fell short of the ultimate goal, but finishing 38-1 and handing blue blood programs UCLA and Kansas historic defeats was a great, great ride. One thing the platoons gave Coach Cal was a ton of offensive flexibility to utilize all sorts of offensive schemes.
The Year of the Point Gawd. When it became obvious that the 2016 Wildcats weren’t going to have a competitive frontcourt, John Calipari gave the keys to the offense to the best backcourt in the country and one of the best in Kentucky history. Tyler Ulis and Jamal Murray led the Cats to regular season and tournament SEC Titles. Out of necessity, this Kentucky team was led almost exclusively from the guard postion.
What wil the 2016-17 Cats do on offense? I don’t know. And at this point, I’m not sure John Calipari knows. Like the mad scientist he is, Cal will figure it out. There’s simply no one better at looking at the pieces of a roster and fitting them together to make a masterpiece.
