LEXINGTON, Ky. — We are inside two weeks to go until the May 31 deadline for men’s college hoops stars to remove their names from the 2023 NBA draft and lock in a return to college basketball. As things presently stand, this is what we know about the 2023-24 Kentucky men’s hoops roster:
There are only seven names of recruited, scholarship players certain to be wearing UK blue and white next winter. That seven consists of five lavishly hyped freshmen and two sparsely used but promising sophomores.
As of now, there is not one player slated to be playing for Kentucky in the coming season who has started even one college game.
Depending on what decisions 2022-23 Cats Chris Livingston, Antonio Reeves and Oscar Tshiebwe make in regard to staying in or exiting from the 2023 NBA draft, UK could soon add three talented veterans and become a legitimate threat to make a deep March Madness run.
Or the Cats could end up scouring the transfer portal in near desperation while needing to supplement a youthful 2023-24 core with experienced talent.
Suffice to say, when it comes to management of Kentucky’s next roster, John Calipari is very much walking on a high wire.
In a coaching tenure in which Kentucky playing rosters seem in near perpetual, year-to-year churn, the UK head man has been in this position before. Most conspicuously, the postscript to UK’s 38-1 season in 2014-15 found Calipari in full-on scramble mode in seeking to assemble a roster for 2015-16.
Even though Kentucky had reached the 2015 Final Four with an undefeated record and was on its way to having six players chosen in that year’s NBA draft — four among the first 13 picks — UK recruiting was suffering that spring. At the time, that reality was widely attributed to rival coaches using against the Cats in recruiting the “platoon system” Calipari implemented in 2014-15 to fully utilize his talent-laden roster.
Then, like now, Kentucky got relatively deep into its offseason with only seven guaranteed, scholarship players on its following season’s team. Veterans Alex Poythress, Derek Willis, Dominique Hawkins and Marcus Lee were slated to be joined on the Cats’ 2015-16 roster by early signees Isaiah Briscoe, Skal Labissiere and Charles Matthews.
With the top high school prospects in the U.S. who had waited to sign in the spring of 2016 such as Jaylen Brown, Brandon Ingram, Malik Newman and Stephen Zimmerman eschewing UK, a resourceful Calipari had to mine non-traditional sources to fill out the Kentucky roster.
On April 29, Kentucky secured the commitment of junior college shooting guard Mychal Mulder. It was June 24 when Canadian high school star Jamal Murray spurned Oregon to pick UK. It was Aug. 20 when Australian big man Isaac Humphries reclassified and moved his college enrollment up a year and joined Kentucky.
With UK’s 2015-16 roster fortified to 10 scholarship players, Calipari led the Wildcats to a 27-9 mark that included an SEC regular-season co-championship and a Southeastern Conference Tournament title.
This spring, the degree to which Calipari will have to again move into scramble mode in his roster construction depends on the stay-or-go decisions of Livingston, Reeves and Tshiebwe.
If all three return, the 2023-24 Kentucky roster would go from no returning college starts to 205.
Should Livingston (26 career starts) turn pro but Reeves (74) and Tshiebwe (105) return and Kentucky then add San Diego State graduate transfer forward Keshad Johnson (71), UK would suddenly have 250 career starts on its next season’s roster.
By that metric, the 2023-24 Cats would go from the least experienced team of the Calipari coaching era at Kentucky to the third-most experienced Wildcats roster since 2009-10.
However, in a scenario in which Kentucky ends up with none or only one of Livingston, Reeves and Tshiebwe on its 2023-24 roster, Calipari would then be forced on a hoops scavenger hunt to fill out his team.
A big difference between the offseason that preceded the 2015-16 year and the current situation is Calipari’s standing with the Big Blue Nation.
In the spring of 2015, Kentucky was in a stretch in which it had played in four of the previous five Final Fours. At that point, Calipari’s “buy-in” from his school’s fan base was robust.
Currently, UK is in an eight-year Final Four drought and hasn’t even reached the second week of a NCAA Tournament since 2019 (recall that, due to the coronavirus pandemic, there was no NCAA Tournament in 2020).
Kentucky’s relative struggles of recent seasons mean Calipari is navigating the current roster uncertainty under a substantially greater level of fan skepticism than he faced in the run up to 2015-16.
Walking on a high wire as it relates to Kentucky’s roster construction is not an unfamiliar place for John Calipari. This time, for myriad reasons, it feels as if the UK head man will not have quite as much net beneath him if he has to “build out” the Cats’ roster on the fly.
