When the 2023-24 season tips off, Kentucky and John Calipari are expected to be moving against one of men’s college basketball’s prevailing tides.
In an era when veteran players continue to dominate the NCAA Tournament, UK and Calipari are expected to field a team next season built around the five incoming freshmen who form Kentucky’s nationally top-ranked class of 2023 recruiting haul.
A squad whose core potentially features five frosh — DJ Wagner (No. 3 in the 2023 Rivals 150), Justin Edwards (No. 4), Aaron Bradshaw (No. 5), Robert Dillingham (No. 7) and Reed Sheppard (No. 22) — will fly in the face of what has proven over the past seven NCAA tournaments to be the best practice in terms of roster composition if your goal is to win it all.
As Connecticut showed yet again this past season, “old is gold” if you want to win the national championship. In terms of experience, the starting lineups for the NCAA champion in the past seven national title games has featured:
— 2023: Connecticut started a senior, two juniors, a sophomore and a redshirt freshman.
— 2022: Kansas started two seniors, a junior and two redshirt sophomores.
— 2021: Baylor started a redshirt senior, a senior and three juniors.
— 2020: No tournament due to the coronavirus.
— 2019: Virginia started a redshirt junior, two juniors, a redshirt sophomore and a freshman.
— 2018: Villanova started three redshirt juniors, a junior and a redshirt freshman.
— 2017: North Carolina started two seniors and three juniors.
— 2016: Villanova started two seniors, two juniors and a freshman.
Of the past 35 players who have started in the NCAA title game for the eventual national champion, exactly two — Villanova’s Jalen Brunson in 2016 and Virginia’s Kihei Clark in 2019 — have been true freshmen.
In the 2023 Final Four, 11 of the 20 starters were either seniors or juniors. Add in redshirt sophomores, and 13 of the 20 players who started in the 2023 national semifinals had been in college for at least three seasons.
Not one true freshman started in the 2023 men’s Final Four.
Yet, given how the past two Kentucky seasons have played out, many UK backers are likely on board with the Wildcats shifting their roster construction back in the direction of highly touted freshmen as the nucleus.
For all the frustrated fan contention that Calipari has proven too stubborn to change, the coach who popularized the one-and-done dynamic in team building after coming to Lexington in 2009 has fielded rosters in the two most recent seasons that, in terms of experience, have looked very much like the veteran squads that have been claiming national championships in recent years.
By the metrics of career starts entering the season, Kentucky’s 2021-22 team was likely the most experienced team in UK basketball history. Boosted by the presence of super seniors Kellan Grady (113 career starts entering the season) and Davion Mintz (100), the 2021-22 Wildcats began that season with a robust 367 career starts spread across their roster.
In its 2021-22 NCAA Tournament opener, Kentucky started a super senior, three juniors and a freshman. Alas, that did not keep the Cats from absorbing what was, by seed, the worst NCAA Tournament loss in school history, an 85-79 overtime defeat to No. 15-seed Saint Peter’s.
Entering this past season, Kentucky boasted the second-most experienced roster of the Calipari era with 262 career starts. In the 2023 NCAA Tournament, Kentucky started three seniors — including the defending national player of the year, Oscar Tshiebwe — and two freshmen.
Nevertheless, the Wildcats again failed to make it out of the first weekend of March Madness, falling 75-69 to Kansas State in the round of 32.
Why hasn’t the move to older players worked out for UK and Calipari as it has done for the schools and coaches who have been making Final Fours and winning national titles with veteran-packed rosters in the years since 2016?
A big part of it has been injuries. In 2021-22, Kentucky never recovered after late season maladies befell veteran guards Grady and Sahvir Wheeler plus freshman TyTy Washington.
For 2022-23, injuries sidelined Wheeler for the last six weeks of the season and forced redshirt senior shooting guard CJ Fredrick into a limited role down the stretch.
That might have just been bad luck. Or it might reflect that Kentucky is not taking injury probability into proper account when evaluating older players — such as Grady, Wheeler and Fredrick — who have come to Kentucky via the transfer portal.
What is certain is that no team starting one-and-done freshmen has won the NCAA title since Duke did so in 2015 with three such players — Justise Winslow, Jahlil Okafor and Tyus Jones.
Yet, given the frustrations created by the fates of the veteran-heavy teams Kentucky has sent into the past two NCAA tournaments, it’s hard to blame Calipari for trying to buck the prevailing experience trend by going back to a roster focused around lavishly hyped freshmen in 2023-24.
