Calipari's master's in chemistry about to pay off for Kentucky
Tune in to “FOX Sports Live” next week for Reid’s one-on-one interview with John Calipari.
LEXINGTON, Kentucky – Here’s an essay question for you: Use logic, statistics and common sense to explain the 2013-14 Kentucky basketball season.
Go ahead. Open that blue book. Give it a try. I dare you.
Here is the set of facts you’ll be working with: Around this time a year ago, we were talking about how super freshman Julius Randle and the rest of Kentucky’s greatest-ever recruiting class of six McDonald’s All-Americans had a shot at college basketball’s holy grail, the perfect season, something that hasn’t been accomplished since Bobby Knight’s Indiana Hoosiers did it in 1976. Head coach John Calipari wasn’t the one to first bring up the possibility of 40-0, but it sure wasn’t like he tossed any water on that fire.
Then the ball was tossed in the air, and Kentucky struggled. They struggled with moving the ball, they struggled with making free throws, they struggled with making threes. They struggled with everything. They came out one game and looked like world-beaters; they came out the next game and looked lost, as if they’d never played a game together. They lost three games in non-conference play – to be fair, all close losses, all to ranked teams – then they went through a bumpy two months of SEC play, losing six games and limping into the NCAA tournament as the most talented 8-seed in history.
For a team with as much hype as Kentucky – as Dick Vitale told USA Today before the season, “Anything less (than a title) would be a huge disappointment” – it felt like the nightmare of the 2012-13 NIT season might repeat itself.
Then the NCAA tournament happened. Aaron Harrison channeled his inner Ray Allen, a bunch of underclassmen learned to play like a team, and a Calipari who’d been struggling with a painful hip problem all season seemed like a rejuvenated man. The same squad that seemed destined to become a laughingstock on March 1, when the Wildcats lost to longtime SEC cellar-dweller South Carolina was, 36 days later, playing UConn for the national championship.
So: How the hell did that happen?
How would you explain the Wildcats’ magical, emotional, unpredictable, inexplicable rollercoaster?
Answer that question convincingly and you’ll pass this master's-level college basketball course with flying colors.
But this season will be a different story in Lexington. Yes, Calipari has brought in his typical load of high-level recruits – four McDonald’s All-Americans this time, the second-ranked class in the nation behind only Duke – but he has a little something that he hasn’t had since his national title team of 2012:
Experience.
What we forget about that 2011-12 Kentucky team, the one that famously started three freshmen, is that it was senior Darius Miller – not future lottery picks Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist – who held the team together.
It’s odd to think of this year’s team, a team that will start two sophomores in the backcourt, as “experienced.” But shouldn’t the ups and downs of last year count as at least two seasons of college hoops experience for Andrew and Aaron Harrison?
It’s odd to think of a team with four freshmen in the rotation – diminutive point guard Tyler Ulis, versatile center Karl-Anthony Towns, sharp-shooting wing Devin Booker and skilled power forward Trey Lyles – as an “experienced” bunch. But that’s exactly what Kentucky will be with juniors Alex Poythress and Willie Cauley-Stein easing the freshmen’s transition.
It’s also odd to think of a one-month hot streak in March 2014 – a hot streak aided by team cohesiveness, late-game heroics and, yes, plenty of luck – as the sort of veteran “experience” that could translate to this team’s success in March 2015.
But when I visited with Calipari in Lexington this offseason for an interview that will air on FOX Sports 1 next week, he told me that’s exactly what he expects.
There are all sorts of examples of teams who made a magical Final Four run one year and used that experience to catapult to a national title the next year. The most recent example was Louisville, a Final Four surprise in 2012, then the national champion in 2013.
But Calipari preferred to tell me about a different example, one from his own experience and one that didn’t end in a title.
In 1996, Calipari’s UMass team made the Final Four, where the Minutemen played Rick Pitino’s stacked Kentucky team in the national semifinal game. Before the game, Calipari and his team huddled on the sideline. Calipari made his players circle up around their star player, Marcus Camby, to shade him from the cameras.
Why? Because that was Camby’s first time on that big of a stage, and he was as white as a sheet, throwing up in the huddle, nervous as all get out. Thirty seconds into the game, Calipari had to sub out his star player to set him straight.
“His eyes are spinning, so I get him out, calm him down, we’re going to be OK,” Calipari told me. “He would have never been that way if we were in the Final Four the year before.”
What does that experience of nearly 20 years ago mean for this year’s Kentucky team?
Just that having been on the Big Stage before – whether it’s the high-expectation Big Stage of any season in Big Blue Nation, or the jittery Big Stage of struggling during conference play, or the bright-lights Big Stage of the Final Four – will make this team far more primed to win it all than the team from a year ago.
Which is a scary thought.
“At the beginning of the year we were probably immature,” Kentucky center Dakari Johnson, one of those six McDonald’s All-Americans from last season’s freshman class, told me. “We kind of listened to the hype a little bit. We really got brought back down to earth when we started dropping games. At the same time, throughout the year we always stuck together. We never broke down or split up. We always stuck together as a group. We just had to learn the game. We were just freshmen and sophomores.”
As he spoke, Johnson was sitting in the Kentucky film room before a recent workout. On the wall were huge photos from last year’s team with printed reminders of the things that made it successful: “TOGETHERNESS.” “UNSELFISH.” “FOCUS.” Scrawled on the whiteboard were some simple keys to how Calipari can turn his young five-star recruits into winning college basketball players. “DEFENSE: Scrap for :35.” “OFFENSE: Create for each other.”
A year ago, these Calipari keywords were just that: words. Now Johnson and the others who’ve been through a season or more under the bright lights of Big Blue Nation know the meaning behind them.
“I didn’t think it was going to be as hard as it was, playing against all these older teams,” Johnson said. “They knew stuff we didn’t. We didn’t know how hard it was going to be to go on the road and play these teams, go into these hostile environments. We went through learning pains.
“But now we know what to expect. We can guide the freshmen this year, so they won’t be like us – they won’t be like deer in headlights.”
On paper, the 2014-15 Kentucky Wildcats look pretty ridiculous, the type of uber-talented team that’ll typically face its stiffest competition against itself in practice. The Harrison twins are thinner and quicker than a year ago. Ulis gives Kentucky a true point guard with court vision and an understanding of spacing, plus he gives Cal an option he didn’t have last season to run a pesky full-court press. Freshman Devin Booker could be the reliable outside shooter last season’s team often lacked.
Towns is one of the more unique college big men in recent years, with the skills to put the ball on the floor, make threes or drop pretty hook shots over defenders. Poythress, still ridiculously athletic, now understands his glue-guy role after two seasons with Cal.
Of course, one lesson from last year’s rollercoaster is that “on paper” is a synonym for “don’t mean a thing.” We often look at Calipari as not a great college basketball coach but as a great fantasy football general manager, a guy who is the best at acquiring the most talented assets, then putting them together and adding up all the stats.
But if this team is able to build on that magical final month from last season, we’ll finally see Calipari’s greatest strength show through: not as the nation’s best recruiter (which he undoubtedly is), but as the nation’s finest chemistry creator, someone who can gather a disparate group of talented individuals and – in a very short period of time – get them to buy into the idea of team.
Another lesson from a year ago: Chemistry takes time.
“We struggled a whole lot last year, but we struggled together,” sophomore forward Marcus Lee, another member of that heralded 2013 recruiting class, told me. “We started off not knowing how hard it was going to be. We thought we’d just go and destroy everybody, to be totally honest. But once we got to the games, we were like, 'oh, this is going to be harder.' It just took us, like every other team that’s new, it took us time to understand ourselves and understand how to win games.”
The biggest thing opponents should fear isn’t that this year’s Kentucky team is simply more talented than anyone else, even though it is, or deeper than anyone else, even though it is. The biggest thing opponents should fear about this year’s Kentucky team is that now the Wildcats understand themselves – not just what they’re good at, but, more important, what they need to work on.
