For Kentucky men’s basketball, its history with 7-footers has been mixed

In 2023-24, John Calipari will be growing membership in the all-time Kentucky men’s basketball “7-footers Club” by almost 17 percent.

The announcement Tuesday by 7-foot-2, 220-pound Croatian center Zvonimir Ivisic that he will play for UK in the coming season had multiple implications.

Ivisic will raise to two the number of 7-footers on the 2023-24 Wildcats roster. The Croatian will join 7-foot, 210-pound freshman Aaron Bradshaw on this coming season’s Kentucky team.

Assuming they both play in games for UK, Ivisic and Bradshaw will bring the all-time number of Kentucky men’s basketball players who have stood at least 7 feet tall to 12.

Exactly half of UK’s all-time 7-footers will have played in the John Calipari coaching era.

As you can read below, the fate of 7-footers at UK can be best described as mixed.

In his 41 seasons (1930-1972) on the UK bench, Adolph Rupp coached only two 7-footers.

The first, Bill Spivey (7-foot, 230 pounds), was the star of Kentucky’s 1951 NCAA Tournament championship team. Over his 63-game UK career, Spivey averaged 19.3 points.

Rupp’s second 7-footer, Tom Payne (7-2, 235 pounds), was also the first Black men’s basketball player who accepted a scholarship offer from Kentucky.

In his one UK varsity season (1970-71) before entering the old NBA “hardship draft,” Payne, a Louisville product, averaged a double-double, 16.9 points and 10.1 rebounds.

During Joe B. Hall’s coaching tenure (1972-85), Kentucky had only one 7-footer make it to the court.

Sam Bowie (7-1, 230) missed two full seasons of his Wildcats career (1979-84) due to leg injuries, but still produced impressive career numbers with 1,285 points, 843 rebounds and 218 blocked shots.

Under Eddie Sutton (1985-89) and Rick Pitino (1989-97), Kentucky never had a 7-footer.

In Tubby Smith’s reign (1997-2007) as top Cat, the coach had an ongoing proclivity for developmental big men.

Smith’s 2005-06 team featured not one, not two but three 7-footers — Shagari Alleyne (7-3, 271), Jared Carter (7-2, 277) and Lukasz Obrzut (7-1, 265).

Alas, not one of Obrzut (196), Alleyne (138) or Carter (40) reached 200 career points at UK.

In the Calipari coaching era (since 2009), 7-footers have consistently played large roles on UK teams.

During UK’s one-and-done era, Willie Cauley-Stein (7-foot, 240) was a rare three-year player (2012-2015) — and a good one. Cauley-Stein was one of the stars on UK’s 38-1 team in 2014-15 and finished his Kentucky career with 843 points, 655 rebounds and 115 blocked shots.

Dakari Johnson (7-foot, 255) played on two Final Four teams (2014 and 2015) in his two-season Kentucky stint. The Brooklyn, N.Y., product scored 450 points and grabbed 334 rebounds in Wildcats blue.

Isaac Humprhies (7-foot, 260) also played two seasons (2015-17) at Kentucky, and had some memorable games. The Sydney, Australia, product went for six points and 12 rebounds at Texas A&M in 2015-16.

Humphries had 12 points and five rebounds in 21 minutes vs. North Carolina in the 2017 NCAA Tournament round of eight. The Australian big man would have become a UK postseason folk hero for his performance vs. UNC had the Wildcats not lost the game on a buzzer beater by North Carolina’s Luke Maye.

Yet for his two-year UK career, Humphries had only 148 points and 162 rebounds.

On Kentucky’s star-crossed 2020-21 team, Wake Forest transfer Olivier Sarr (7-foot, 237 pounds) averaged 10.8 points, 5.2 rebounds and 1.2 blocks. The 2020-21 Cats produced the worst record, 9-16, in modern UK basketball history in the coronavirus pandemic-impacted season.

As for the incoming 7-footers, Bradshaw is ranked as the No. 2 prospect in the class of 2023 in the Rivals 150. However, the product of New Jersey’s Camden High School is recovering from surgery after suffering a foot injury.

Ivisic has played alongside his twin brother, Tomislav, for the past two seasons for SC Derby, a team based in Montenegro, a country in the Balkans region in southeastern Europe. He entered his name in both the 2022 and 2023 NBA Drafts, but withdrew each time.

According to CBSSports.com’s Kyle Boone, Ivisic shot 74.1% from two-point range and 34.4% from three-point range in seven games this summer while playing in the under-20 classification on the FIBA circuit. He averaged 11.4 points and 5.3 rebounds per game.

It will be fascinating to see how often Calipari deploys Ivisic and Bradshaw together on the court in alignments of 7-foot twin towers next season.

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