John Calipari knows he has a good team. (Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports)
Wednesday morning’s SEC Tipoff brought a different venue as the Ballantyne Resort in southern Charlotte, North Carolin hosted the SEC Men’s Basketball kickoff. The correlation was with the SEC Network, a stone’s throw away from the sprawling golf resort that Kentucky coach John Calipari honestly did not know was in existence.
The dynamic, the diversity and the different culture was in the air with all 14 squads, but none more so than Calipari’s Wildcats, who are once again many people’s preseason national champion.
Calipari knew when twins Aaron and Andrew Harrison, Willie Cauley-Stein, and Dakari Johnson came back for the 2014-15 season that he would have to find a way to mesh those skilled players with the top incoming recruiting class in the nation. The verdict: Two-platooning where a coach substitutes five players for another five players at one time. With that comes the realization that he could have 12 players deserving minutes. But Calipari has to fit the correct 10 in the two-platoon system.
“I have never coached ten guys like this,” Calipari said of the depth of talent on this Kentucky squad. “I keep saying 10, but when Aaron was out of practice and then Dominique (Hawkins) stepped in and it was crazy how well he played. Trey Lyles hurt his shoulder and Derrick Willis walks in. They all deserve to play. There are 10 that separated and now, how do you rotate those other two guys in?”
Once again, the national media beats the drum to the chant that this “is definitely” Calipari’s most talented bevy of round-ballers. The coach asks though that no one forgets his 2010 Elite Eight entrant and the impeccably strong 2012 national championship team that finished 38-2.
“When you start talking great players and talent is when you start talking John Wall, Eric Bledsoe, Patrick Patterson … and who was that big kid? Oh, Demarcus Cousins,” Calipari said. “Wait a minute now, Darius Miller, DeAndre Liggins, Daniel Horton. They say I can’t coach and maybe that is the truth, I don’t know. We went to an Elite Eight with that team.”
Calipari vaguely transitioned as he amusingly began naming players on the national title team.
“Then we go to Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Terrence Jones, and you still had Marquis Teague and Doron Lamb and we won. ‘Well that’s because you had good players,’”
Calipari also reminded the media of what common stereotypes say about him and his teams, “Oh, I have had some really good talented teams so with this team, we will see.”
Calipari noted that he is not too worried about meshing this group of players together. He likes the maturity of Aaron and Andrew Harrison along with the chemistry that is developing between juniors like Cauley-Stein, Alex Poythress, Dakari Johnson and Marcus Lee. Mixing in freshmen Tyler Ulls, Devin Booker, Karl Towns, and Trey Lyles insists that Calipari makes decisions on lineups, almost like a surgeon prepping for different types of surgeries.
“We went to the Bahamas and two-platooned for a reason,” explained Calipari of his reasoning. “We wanted them to see what it would be like to play this way. We also flew in professional teams to see if we could learn to against the best of these teams. If we had played bad teams in the Bahamas they would have said, ‘You can do it against bad teams. Let’s see you do it against good teams.’”
With any change comes concerns. The first is the depth as he wonders how using so many players could disrupt the team’s rhythm in a game against a team that is seven or eight deep, but has tremendous rhythm and chemistry.
“The issue we are going to have is when I do this and we lose some games early,” Calipari informed, “There are going to be teams that are seven deep that if I were playing seven, we would be in good shape, but I am playing 10 or 12, so we are not going to have the same rhythm that they are going to have.”
The second concern is what Calipari alludes to as “clutter.” All of the noise around the team that could disrupt its focus. Once the media or the internet boards question his rotation, how will it affect the players? Then, the “clutter” can form around the individuals who are closest to the players and all of a sudden there comes a struggle between what the coach feel is best for the team vs. the parents or people close to those players who are looking out for the best interests of their appointed individual.
“The second issue is the clutter – all of you guys playing one guy off another, this guy should be his point guard, this guy shouldn’t play,” said Calipari as the media gathered around him chuckled while he gave examples. “‘They’re talking about Karl Towns, well, what about Dakari?’ And now the players don’t know, so who is the next person they go to? Their parents. What do you think about your son being behind this guy? All that is the clutter.”
Calipari seems sold on the character of this team and the development of the chemistry and the embracing of the system. He carefully illustrated the fine line between keeping the team as a core unit and it becoming divided based on what is said about and around members of the team.
“It’s not these kids,” he commented, “These kids have bought in. They’re fine. If I had two or three guys then you can’t do this. These kids are all within five percent of each other. In practice there are no blowouts.”
Quoting South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier at the SEC Football Media Days in July: “‘This is ‘talking season.’”
As college basketball season approaches the 2014-15 team as talented as any Calipari squad that’s been at Kentucky, who ranks as Lindy’s top-ranked team entering the season. And after they tread through the “clutter,” it’s pretty much a given that these Wildcats will likely be a topic of conversation in March.
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