Calipari challenges Coach K on one-and-dones. ‘I did it before you, and then you copied.’

Appearing on the podcast of fellow Hall of Famer Mike Krzyzewski this week, John Calipari couldn’t help but get in a little dig.

Kentucky’s coach was talking about leading a young team — noting that he has played five freshmen at the same time at points this season, as he did early in his tenure at UK — when he referenced a strategic shift in Krzyzewski’s roster-building approach.

“Now Coach, you got 25- and 26-year-olds playing now. 27-year-olds playing now,” Calipari said. “And we’re playing with 19-year-olds. It’s different than it was when you were doing it and I was doing it. I did it before you, and then you copied. But when we were doing it — taking young guys and playing …”

Coach K burst into laughter.

“What happened? Somebody say something?” Calipari replied with a comedic tone.

He went on to say that during the times when he featured primarily young players — most notably with the 2013-14 Final Four team, which had five freshmen starters — the opposition wasn’t as old as it is now. Those Cats played against 22- and 23-year-olds, Calipari said, before the extra season of eligibility for COVID-impacted players and the emergence of the transfer portal and NIL possibilities combined to make college basketball the older players’ sport that it is now.

Krzyzewski let Calipari say his piece before politely returning to the point that made him laugh.

“We didn’t copy,” said the former Duke coach. “We recruited the same guys, except that the NBA took them, like they were taking your guys. So, we were the only two that did that. Then they said, ‘Kentucky and Duke — they’re the only one-and-done teams.’ Now, everyone’s one-and-done, right? With the transfer portal.”

Calipari let it rest there, simply adding a comment on the portal. “Oh, it’s crazy,” he said.

This time, however, Kentucky’s coach had a case.

Duke didn’t start bringing in probable one-and-done prospects in large numbers until the 2014-15 season, well after Calipari had leaned heavily into the strategy. The 2005-06 season was the first under the current guidelines that don’t allow players to jump straight from high school to the NBA draft, and Calipari had three one-and-done players at Memphis and 13 more at Kentucky between then and the 2014-15 campaign. Duke had just three such players over those 10 seasons.

While Krzyzewski is correct that Duke wasn’t steering clear of one-and-done players completely before the 2014-15 season, it’s also true that the Blue Devils weren’t pursuing such prospects at nearly the same rate as Calipari.

Kentucky’s one-and-done success

Corey Maggette was Duke’s first one-and-done player, leaving Durham after his freshman season for the 1999 NBA draft. Five years later, Luol Deng did the same. But that was it until 2011, when Kyrie Irving became the No. 1 overall draft pick after just one season in college.

By that point, Calipari had already completed two seasons at Kentucky — going to the Elite Eight as a 1 seed in year one and advancing to UK’s first Final Four in 13 years in season two — and he’d coached four one-and-done players in his nine seasons at Memphis from 2000-09, three of them after the change to NBA eligibility rules.

Calipari wasn’t the only coach going after one-and-dones, obviously, but his recruiting prowess, winning track record and blue-blood standing at UK proved the perfect combination to make annual splashes with the nation’s top prospects. At this time, the other blue bloods weren’t yet recruiting probable one-and-done players at near the rate Kentucky was pursuing them, leaving more opportunities for Calipari to secure such prospects.

UK had never had a one-and-done player in the modern era before Calipari’s arrival in 2009, but the new coach brought in 13 recruits that would go on to the NBA draft as freshmen over his first five seasons. Krzyzewski had only three one-and-dones in that span: Irving, Austin Rivers and Jabari Parker, and — following an NCAA title in 2010 — the Blue Devils didn’t make a Final Four over the next four seasons of that time frame, losing in the NCAA Tournament first round twice.

Meanwhile, Calipari and the Wildcats made three Final Four appearances in those four years, winning the 2012 national title and playing in the 2014 title game. (And his 2009-10 squad before that, one featuring four one-and-done draft picks, might have been the best in the country before an Elite Eight upset to West Virginia.)

Months before UK’s run in the 2014 tournament — with a team led by six McDonald’s All-American freshmen — the Blue Devils had already started to shift strategy, signing the can’t-miss recruiting trio of Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow, along with fellow five-star prospect Grayson Allen, for their 2014 class.

The next season was the turning point. The two blue bloods seemed destined to meet in the 2015 national title game, with Kentucky — a roster featuring four McDonald’s All-American freshmen and several five-star holdovers from the previous class — went 38-0 until a loss to Wisconsin in the national semifinals. Two days later, that Duke team led by elite freshmen beat the Badgers for the national title.

Okafor, Jones and Winslow all bolted for the NBA draft, as did the Kentucky one-and-done trio of Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker and Trey Lyles.

Starting with that class, Coach K went pretty much all in with one-and-dones. From the 2015 draft up until Krzyzewski’s retirement in 2022, the Blue Devils had 21 players leave after just one season. Calipari had 20 such players in that same span — one fewer than Duke — and Kentucky’s list included Hamidou Diallo, who actually spent a redshirt semester in Lexington before debuting the following season, and “none-and-done” Shaedon Sharpe, who spent only one semester at UK and didn’t play a single minute for the Wildcats before turning pro in 2022.

Duke’s one-and-done shift

Duke assistant coach Chris Carrawell played for the Blue Devils from 1996-2000 and was on the team when Maggette decided to go one-and-done. “I was a little surprised,” Carrawell recalled in an interview with the Associated Press for a story on one-and-dones posted last week.

Imagine Carrawell’s surprise when he returned to Duke in 2018 as an assistant.

“We actually recruited those guys and would tell them, ‘You’re not going to be here long,’” Carrawell said. “I was really amazed how Coach K adjusted to that, the different eras and how we used to be and perceived back then. Man, you would’ve never thought Duke would be a school with one-and-dones.”

Of course, neither program has had considerable postseason success since that 2014-15 season in which both blue bloods went to the Final Four (and Coach K won the last of his five NCAA titles).

Kentucky hasn’t been back to college basketball’s biggest stage, appearing in the 2017 and 2019 Elite Eights — with three and two one-and-dones on those teams, respectively — but not coming close to matching Calipari’s initial success.

Duke teams featuring Brandon Ingram (Sweet 16), Jayson Tatum (second round), Marvin Bagley (Elite Eight) and the trio of RJ Barrett, Zion Williamson and Cam Reddish (Elite Eight) all failed to make the Final Four in the years immediately following the program’s 2015 title. All of those star players were also Kentucky recruiting targets before their commitments to Duke.

The Blue Devils, like the Wildcats, missed the NCAA Tournament completely in the COVID-impacted 2020-21 season, both teams’ one-and-done players struggling relative to expectations amid the unorthodox circumstances.

Star freshman Paolo Banchero — the No. 1 pick in the 2022 draft — got Krzyzewski back to the 2022 Final Four in his farewell season, but the Blue Devils were ousted by North Carolina there.

With Krzyzewski gone, new Duke coach Jon Scheyer has upheld the one-and-done recruiting tradition, and he and Calipari are still dominating that landscape. The Blue Devils nabbed the nation’s top class in 2022, finished second (behind Kentucky) in 2023, and the two programs are 1-2 again for the 2024 cycle, with the Blue Devils — bringing in a class led by projected No. 1 NBA pick Cooper Flagg — getting the slight edge.

On the court, Calipari has perhaps his best team in years, and it’s another roster dominated by freshmen, with five Wildcats on this squad (Aaron Bradshaw, Rob Dillingham, Justin Edwards, Reed Sheppard and D.J. Wagner) projected as one-and-done NBA draft picks.

Kentucky is currently the No. 6-ranked team in the nation and a legitimate Final Four contender.

While the transfer portal has become the go-to for most of college basketball, Calipari is pivoting back to an all-in approach with star recruits. He’s said time and again over the years that he’d rather have talent than experience — he’s reiterated this point several times over the past few months — and his roster construction for this season and the next one backs up that talk.

“I’m not changing,” Calipari told the Herald-Leader in the preseason. “I’m going to recruit the best freshman player that I can get.”

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