For Calipari, moving UK basketball beyond one-and-done is proving daunting

As the teams winning NCAA championships have become consistently older in the years since 2015, Kentucky and head man John Calipari — once synonymous with one-and-done freshmen — have adjusted.

In the ill-fated 2022 NCAA Tournament round of 64 against Saint Peter’s, UK started a super-senior, three juniors and a freshman.

On Sunday, in the 2023 NCAA tourney round of 32 vs. Kansas State, Kentucky’s starters were three seniors and two freshmen.

Yet where programs such as Villanova, North Carolina, Baylor and Kansas have claimed NCAA championships by “getting older,” UK’s results have waned as its rosters have grown more mature.

Another UK basketball season came to an early ending in the NCAA Tournament on Sunday. Behind 27 points, nine assists and three steals from former Cordia High School guard Markquis Nowell, No. 3 seed Kansas State beat No. 6 seed Kentucky with a 75-69 victory in the East Region before a heavily pro-UK crowd of 16,517 in Greensboro Coliseum.

UK (22-12) lost in spite of getting 25 points and 18 rebounds from senior star Oscar Tshiebwe and 21 points, nine rebounds, four assists and two steals from freshman point guard Cason Wallace.

“Tough way to end,” Calipari said. “We had some guys really fight like crazy and had a couple of guys offensively not play their game like they did all year — but that can happen this time of year.”

After going 22-4 and reaching five Elite Eights, four Final Fours and winning a national title in his first five NCAA tournaments as Kentucky coach, Calipari has gone 10-6 with two Elite Eights in his last six NCAA tourneys.

Even factoring in the very large variable that luck plays in March Madness outcomes, those numbers seem an indisputable sign of program slippage.

Among Calipari’s growing number of critics in the Big Blue Nation, one charge often made is that the coach, 64, is too stubborn to change.

In at least two major areas, that is clearly untrue.

Unquestionably, Calipari’s teams have gotten older in recent seasons.

Yet the very experienced 2021-22 team lost to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in its first tourney game.

This season’s relatively experienced roster fell to a good Kansas State team in its second NCAA Tournament tip-off.

On Sunday, while freshmen Wallace and Chris Livingston (11 points, seven rebounds) played well for Kentucky, two of UK’s senior standouts, forward Jacob Toppin and guard Antonio Reeves, suffered through NCAA tourney nightmares.

Toppin fouled out after going 1-of-7 from the field with two points and four rebounds. Reeves went 1-of-15 on field-goal attempts, 1-of-10 on three-pointers and scored all five of his points in the final 15 seconds.

“I felt like every (shot) was going in, they just didn’t,” Reeves said in a subdued UK locker room. “A couple of them came off (my hand) really good. Some of them rimmed out. Some of them skipped the basket front to end.”

As the Golden State Warriors have led basketball toward greater emphasis on perimeter shooting, Calipari adjusted his roster construction.

Reeves and Iowa transfer CJ Fredrick were recruited to specifically give Kentucky an outside threat of sufficient capacity to spread defenses.

The same was true on last season’s roster with Kellan Grady.

Yet in the last two NCAA Tournament games in which Kentucky has been eliminated, the three players imported to be outside marksmen have combined to shoot 3-of-27 from the floor and 3-of-20 on three-pointers.

Grady went 1-of-9 on field goals, 1-of-7 on three-pointers against Saint Peter’s last year; Reeves was 1-of-15, 1-of-10 and Fredrick 1-of-3, 1-of-3 against Kansas State on Sunday.

“You can’t go 0-for-20 — you can’t in these games,” Calipari said of UK’s errant shooting. “In these kind of games, you’ve got to make those shots. You’ve got to make baskets.”

Unhappy UK backers don’t want to hear it, but the 10-year contract that the University of Kentucky signed Calipari to after the 2018-19 season contains such hefty buyouts for firing the Wildcats head man without cause — it would be around $40 million this offseason — that Calipari is going to be leading the Wildcats program for the foreseeable future if he wants to be.

“I understand what this program is about,” Calipari said Sunday. “I think, again, that’s what makes it what it is, and that’s why I tell players, this isn’t for everybody because the expectations are so high.”

Next season, Kentucky is bringing in the top-ranked recruiting class in men’s college basketball. However, the recruiting gurus do not consider the class of 2023 to be an especially strong one overall.

So it would seem a heavy lift to expect UK’s incoming class of DJ Wagner, Aaron Bradshaw, Justin Edwards, Robert Dillingham and Reed Sheppard to be primarily responsible for restoring Kentucky basketball’s faded glory.

Yet, as the last two seasons have shown, supplementing the Cats roster with the type of experienced players who are winning championships at other schools has not proven the full-proof antidote for what ails Kentucky basketball, either.

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