What recent college basketball history says about this Kentucky team’s chances for success
John Calipari is trying to turn back the clock in hopes of recapturing his extraordinary level of early success at Kentucky. The rest of college basketball is headed in a different direction.
Everyone else is doing that for good reason, scream the most recent results.
Following two seasons that featured UK lineups heavy on upperclassmen and began with seemingly realistic Final Four hopes only to end far short of that goal, Calipari is going back to what got him to the pinnacle of the sport. Freshmen. And lots of them.
This Kentucky roster will have eight such players. At least two will be starters and expected stars. A few others are projected to earn major minutes.
It’s a formula that obviously worked well in the early stages of the Calipari era, which featured four Final Four appearances in the first six seasons. All four of those teams had multiple freshman starters. The 2012 national title team had three. The squad that played for an NCAA title in 2014 had five. (And the 35-3 team of 2009-10 — Calipari’s first season, the one that reignited UK basketball and ended one victory shy of the Final Four — had three, too.)
Kentucky, of course, hasn’t made it back to the final weekend of the college basketball season since 2015, when the Wildcats’ lineup featured two freshman starters (Karl-Antony Towns and Trey Lyles) and two others that played prominent roles off the bench (Devin Booker and Tyler Ulis).
That team finished 38-1, one game shy and two wins short of a national championship and unprecedented 40-0 season. Duke won the NCAA title that year. The Blue Devils had three freshman starters. But, since then, no team with such a lineup has come close to cutting down the nets, a hard truth that illustrates the difficult path ahead for Calipari and these young Cats.
Few freshmen in Final Four
The Final Four rosters over the past five NCAA Tournaments show a clear pattern: older players, not five-star freshmen, are the guys getting their teams to the sport’s biggest stage.
Of the 100 starters across those 20 national semifinalists dating back to the 2018 Final Four, only nine were freshmen. And two of those players had redshirted a season — getting acclimated to college basketball and their respective teams — before making their playing debuts.
At the same time, the majority of those Final Four starters over the past five tournaments have been players with more than two years of previous college experience. Nearly three-quarters of those players (74 out of 100) were fifth-years, seniors, juniors or redshirt sophomores by the time their teams made it to the national semifinals.
The explosion of the transfer portal and the prevalence of fifth-year players — thanks to the extra season of eligibility granted by the NCAA due to the COVID-19 pandemic — have allowed teams to get older, if they want to, and pick proven veterans out of the portal as late additions to their lineups rather than rely on under-the-radar freshman recruits.
The most recent NCAA Tournament provided the best example of that. Eighteen of the 20 starters at the 2023 Final Four had been on campus for at least three years. The outliers were UConn’s Alex Karaban (a redshirt freshman) and Jordan Hawkins (a sophomore). The rest were grizzled college basketball veterans.
Role players, not stars
Of those nine freshmen that started for Final Four teams since 2018, few would be considered stars, by any stretch of the definition. Here’s a look at those nine:
▪ Alex Karaban (UConn 2023): 9.3 ppg, 4.5 rpg
▪ Paolo Banchero (Duke 2022): 17.2, 7.8 rpg, 3.2 apg
▪ AJ Griffin (Duke 2022): 10.4 ppg, 3.9 rpg
▪ Jalen Suggs (Gonzaga 2021): 14.4 ppg, 5.3 rpg, 4.5 apg
▪ Kihei Clark (Virginia 2019): 4.5 ppg, 2.3 rpg, 2.6 apg
▪ Aaron Henry (Michigan State 2019): 6.1 ppg, 3.8 rpg
▪ Cameron Krutwig (Loyola 2018): 10.5 ppg, 6.1 rpg
▪ Isaiah Livers (Michigan 2018): 3.4 ppg, 2.3 rpg
▪ Omari Spellman (Villanova 2018): 10.9 ppg, 8.0 rpg
Banchero was a star, obviously. He was the No. 1 pick in that year’s NBA Draft, too. Suggs was a star for that 2021 Gonzaga team and the No. 5 pick in the draft. And that’s about it.
Griffin and Krutwig were surely important to their respective teams, but both were fifth on those squads in scoring. Spellman provided a post presence for that 2018 Villanova team and led the Wildcats in rebounding, but upperclassman starters Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges — as well as veteran sixth-man Donte DiVincenzo — were the real stars. The others on the list were clear role players, mostly surrounded by far-more experienced teammates.
This Kentucky team won’t have that luxury.
If these Wildcats are going to be “Final Four good,” it will almost certainly involve major star turns from at least two of the freshmen, namely Justin Edwards and D.J. Wagner, who have both been projected as NBA lottery picks in next year’s draft.
Fifth-year players Antonio Reeves and Tre Mitchell — the only scholarship upperclassmen on the roster — will play meaningful roles, but it’s difficult to imagine this UK team making a real run without Edwards, Wagner and possibly another freshman or two taking a big step toward star territory.
Freshmen on title teams
No matter where Kentucky is ranked to start the season — and the Cats are at No. 16 to begin this one, lowest of the Calipari era — the expectation in Lexington remains the same, year after year.
Calipari owned that at his annual media day press conference last month.
“It doesn’t matter who’s in that uniform,” he said. “What’s the expectation? National championship.”
Eight and a half years after that Duke team won the title with freshmen Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow leading the way, college basketball’s national championship teams have looked much different.
The seven NCAA title teams since then have featured just four freshmen in their starting lineups. Two of those were redshirts. None were stars. At the time of those titles, at least.
Alex Karaban was a fine player for UConn last season, finishing fourth on the team in points, fourth in rebounds and third in assists. He averaged 6.5 points and 7.0 rebounds at the Final Four and played in a starting five with three upperclassmen. Karaban also spent part of the previous season with the Huskies as a mid-year enrollee.
Kihei Clark — a 5-foot-9 point guard — was sixth in points on Virginia’s 2019 title team, seventh in rebounds and second in assists. He didn’t establish himself as a regular starter until February, and he remains the only “true” freshman since 2016 to start the NCAA title game for the winning side.
Omari Spellman sat out his first year on Villanova’s campus due to academic reasons. During that time, Spellman completely reshaped his body — going from 300 to 245 pounds — and entered the 2017-18 season in a much better spot to make a meaningful impact. If not for that redshirt year, it’s unlikely Spellman would have reached the same heights as a freshman.
Jalen Brunson started 39 of 40 games for Villanova’s 2015-16 title team. Brunson might be a household name now, but he wasn’t then. He averaged 9.6 points and 2.5 assists per game during his first year in college, taking an even bigger backseat in the NCAA Tournament, where he averaged just 6.0 points and 1.0 assist over the final four games of Nova’s title run.
Finding hope in Duke?
Antonio Reeves and Tre Mitchell will start for this Kentucky team. That’s two veterans.
The rest of the lineup will be manned by young guys, no matter what Calipari decides to do.
Wagner and Edwards are almost certain to start. The fifth spot could go to sophomore Adou Thiero, especially in the short term, while the Wildcats await the return of their sidelined trio of 7-footers. By the time the NCAA Tournament comes around, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see three freshmen in UK’s starting five. Aaron Bradshaw, if healthy, would be a top option. The versatile 7-1 newcomer is viewed as a potential lottery pick and has perhaps the highest upside of any player in college basketball. Fellow freshman center Zvonimir Ivisic has plenty of promise, too. Rob Dillingham, who dropped 40 points in UK’s Blue-White Game last month, could also break in. But, regardless of who’s in that first five, there will be at least two freshmen in the mix.
Just one Final Four team since 2015 has featured such a lineup.
The Duke Blue Devils of the 2021-22 season — the last for coach Mike Krzyzewski — started freshmen Paolo Banchero and AJ Griffin, sophomores Jeremy Roach and Mark Williams, and junior Wendell Moore. (And freshman Trevor Keels played major minutes off the bench.)
That’s the least experienced Final Four team of the past several years, by a pretty wide margin. And its run should provide Kentucky fans with a glimmer of hope that such a team can still thrive among the relative olds of the sport.
Of course, that Duke team had Banchero leading the way. Can Edwards (or someone else) in this freshman class rise to that level? And that Blue Devils squad was also more highly touted going into the season. In fact, Duke never left the Associated Press top 10 during the entire 2021-22 campaign. The Blue Devils beat a veteran UK team — led by eventual national player of the year Oscar Tshiebwe — on opening night. Duke suffered just one loss all season to a team outside of the ACC, winning the league and earning a 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The Blue Devils’ season ended with a Final Four loss to red-hot rival North Carolina, a team with three upperclassmen and two sophomores in the starting five. Two days later, that UNC team lost to Kansas. The seven players who played the most minutes for the Jayhawks had a combined total of 28 years of experience on a college campus.
Eight of Kentucky’s 12 scholarship players this season are entering their first season of college. Two others are 19-year-old sophomores who played sparingly as freshmen.
If this is going to be a banner season for the Cats, they’ll have to buck quite a bit of recent history.
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