The Kentucky Wildcats aren’t receiving much love from Sports Illustrated in the site’s Off-season Power Rankings.
SI has the Wildcats at No. 5 in their rankings. Duke is No. 1, followed by Kansas, Villanova and Oregon.
Here’s an excerpt about UK:
5 KENTUCKY WILDCATS
The Wildcats should be good enough to run away with the SEC, but will their offense be efficient enough to win the school’s ninth national title? I have them 2-3 spots lower than other offseason rankings mostly because I have concerns about their long-range shooting ability. Senior stretch-four Derek Willis will almost certainly be Kentucky’s most dangerous perimeter threat, as it’s likely to start one non-shooting guard (sophomore Isaiah Briscoe), a freshman point guard with a suspect long-range shot (De’Aaron Fox) and a freshman combo guard (Malik Monk) whom I’d define as more of a volume scorer than a marksman.
AAU, high-school all-star and summer sneaker-camp stats collected by DraftExpress allow us to get a sense of how Fox and Monk profile as shooters coming into college, and how they compare to past and present Kentucky guards. In a sample of 232 treys over the past three years, Fox made just 28.0%. Monk’s sample is much larger—383 treys, which accounted for 45.5% of his shots—and his accuracy is slightly better, at 32.1%. But their pre-Kentucky profiles lag well behind those of Jamal Murray, Tyler Ulis or Devin Booker, all of whose high-school accuracy translated over to college.
