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By
Mike Rutherford @CardChronicle on Nov 9,
2015, 10:54a
It should as no surprise that the Kentucky Wildcats are
once again the No. 1 team in our preseason countdown.
The John Calipari era in
Lexington has been loaded with firsts. First
program to produce 15 first-round draft picks in five years. First program to
bring in five consecutive top-ranked recruiting classes. First team to earn a
preseason No. 1 ranking the year after missing the tournament entirely. First
program to produce the No. 1 and No. 2 draft pick in the same year. First
program since Duke (1990-94) to make four Final Four appearances in five years.
First team to start a season 38-0.
The last item on that list was supposed to be
different. Perfection was supposed to be the coup de grĂ¢ce for Kentucky. Forty wins and
no losses: the unreachable fruit that only Cal's Cats could grab, and the giant middle
finger to the face of anyone with a problem. Instead, it was 38-1 -- good
enough to be stuck somewhere between 2013-14 Wichita State
and 1990-91 UNLV, and forever locked out of the home of those who hoisted the
hardwood on the first Monday in April.
As is the case with any life-altering heartbreak, Big
Blue Nation will never be able to fully rid itself of the scar that came with
Kentucky's Final Four loss to
Wisconsin. There may, however, be a major
shot coming in five months that will effectively numb the pain.
Slotting UK
at No. 1 has become the safe play for any preseason top 25 countdown, and with
good reason. The Wildcats under Calipari have only really made preseason
prognosticators look silly once, when a subpar national freshman class and a
season-ending injury to star center Nerlens Noel left Kentucky finishing the 2012-13 season in the
NIT. Outside of that, Cal
has led the Cats to five Elite Eights, four Final Fours, two national title
games and brought home the program's eighth NCAA championship. A healthy run at
No. 9 figures to start on Nov. 13.
While the subject may rear its head again if they beat
reigning national champion Duke on Nov. 17,
Kentucky's 2015-16 campaign is unlikely to
be dominated by the "pursuit of perfection" talk that was more
prevalent than any other throughout last season. The Wildcats will be dealing
with what should be a much-improved SEC, and in addition to the Blue Devils,
UK has non-conference showdowns with
Kansas, UCLA,
Ohio
State and
Louisville. A slip-up at some point before
the calendar makes the dramatic flip to March seems like more of an
inevitability than it did last November.
Get Ready for New Season
Kentucky, UNC tie for No.
1 in first pollPreviews for our top 25
teams Though Kentucky carries the same coaches' poll ranking
into this season as they did 12 months ago, there are few in Lexington who
believe this group would match up all that favorably with the team that came so
close to being college basketball's first unblemished champion in nearly four
decades. That doesn't necessarily mean that the 2015-16 Cats don't have a
better shot at finishing their season with some net-cutting.
From the first day of the 2014-15 season, the
overwhelming consensus was that a "great" team was going to win the
national championship. There were five or six teams that appeared to fit that
mold, and it would have been extremely surprising if one of those squads didn't
wind up claiming the title. One of them did. It just wasn't
Kentucky. The Wildcats were a great team in
a season that featured a handful of other great teams. They ran up against one
of those teams on the season's final weekend, and that great team was better
than they were on that particular night. It's as simple, and as painful, as
that.
The sport's landscape would appear to be more navigable
in 2015-16. There is no overly apparent dividing line between the group of
teams who should rule the season and those who are merely staring up in
envy. For Kentucky,
a squad with yet another loaded class of newcomers, a returning starter at the
most key of positions on a Calipari team, and a couple battle-tested bigs, this
is an appealing setup.
Timing isn't everything in college basketball, but it's
more important than it is in any other major American sport. Overwhelmingly
positive or negative work that took four months to comprise can be completely
wiped away by one or two good or bad weeks in March. In keeping with that
theme, improved timing might be more important than an improved team when it
comes to
Kentucky's
quest for championship No. 9.
Projected Lineup
PG Tyler Ulis Sophomore
SG Jamal Murray
Freshman
SF Isaiah Briscoe Freshman
PF Skal Labissiere Freshman
C Marcus Lee Junior
Key reserves: G Dominique Hawkins (Sophomore), F
Alex Poythress (Senior), F Derek Willis (Junior), G Charles Matthews
(Freshman), G Mychal Mulder (Junior), F Tai Wynyard (Freshman), C Isaac
Humphries (Freshman)
How Kentucky
can succeed: Let their latest dose of soon-to-be millionaires do their thing
Nothing that
Kentucky
has done since John Calipari arrived in 2009 has been ordinary, which is why
it's impossible to handle previews of the Wildcats in any of the traditional
fashions. Categories like "returning starters" and "percentage
of scoring lost" are highly relevant for just about every team in the
country, but
UK
is never like every other team in the country.
Where Karl-Anthony
Towns, Willie
Cauley-Stein, Trey Lyles and Devin Booker exited, Skal Labissiere, Jamal
Murray, Isaiah Briscoe and Tyler Ulis enter. Think about that: four players
from the same program were all lottery picks in the same draft, and that same
program is sitting here as the projected No. 1 team in college basketball for
the very next season. The fact that we don't find this occurrence even the
least bit strange anymore might be even more insane than the actual phenomenon itself.
Any team that can count itself among the most talented
in the country is going to enjoy a high level of success, and Kentucky appears
once again to be loaded with players who will realize their lifelong dreams at
next June's NBA Draft.
Recently cleared Labissiere has been at No. 1 or No. 2
on just about every 2016 NBA mock draft since their inception.
Murray never finds
himself too far below his teammate, and many believe the Canadian might
actually be the bigger star this season. Briscoe is yet another consensus top
10 recruit whose stay in college is expected to be short. Ulis was widely
considered to be the best point guard on last year's Kentucky team, and would
have likely been the fifth Wildcat to hear his name called in the first round
of the draft had he elected to follow the worn-out path of the one-and-done.
Instead, he's back for another year in
Lexington,
and may have a bigger impact than any returning player in the Calipari era.
If you're looking for comparisons between this squad and
the 2012 one which cut down the nets in New Orleans,
there's this: Calipari has had just one Kentucky
team that has received significant production from a senior, the national
championship team which saw Darius Miller average just under 10 points per
game. This year's team figures to receive a similar boost from Poythress, who
was never expected to be around this long, but who now finds himself as the
first Calipari recruit to play four years at Kentucky.
The other major parallel is that this team will allow Calipari
to get back to letting his guys get up and down the court, a style which was
noticeably lacking the past two seasons with the more halfcourt-oriented
Harrison twins running the show. It's a shift that
figures to please both Big Blue Nation and its front man.
How Kentucky loses early: A culture clash finally goes down in Lexington
There is no lack of evidence to support the widely-held
belief that the egos attached to the highest-profile basketball recruits in the
AAU era have gotten out of control. With that being the case, maybe the most
remarkable aspect of what Calipari has been able to do at UK is that he's
brought together the cream of the recruiting crop and never seemed to have much
of an issue with his players coming together to pursue one common goal.
There has been nothing so far this summer or fall to
indicate that this trend is going to be broken in 2015-16, but if you're
looking for a reason why the Cats might be unsuccessful this season, that's
about all there is. Maybe Lee, Poythress and Ulis don't take kindly to the 2015
crew once they start stealing the spotlight. Maybe Willis finally freaks out
over being a former highly-rated recruit who gets treated like a glorified
walk-on. Maybe Mulder smells and it creates a bad locker room environment.
These are the types of things that
Kentucky's competition has to hope for in
the Calipari era.
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