The Cat Quandary

John Calipari and Kentucky are putting together the youngest, least experienced roster in America with non-elite talent. Will it work? Has it worked before?

Go anywhere on the Internet - well, a very specific part of the Internet - and you will find major media types with serious thoughts on the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball program.

As of now, per Bart Torvik’s projections, no team will enter the 2023-24 college basketball season with less on-court experience than the Kentucky Wildcats. This is not a shocking new thing for John Calipari to deal with, of course. Five of Cal’s six teams from 2013 to 2018 ranked in the 300s in on-court experience entering a season. However, this would be something different; only one other team in Kentucky history (2017-18) will have fewer years of experience than this one, and only 2017-18 and 2020-21 will have fewer returning minutes.

To be sure, the three-piece of Justin Edwards (#3 nationally), Aaron Bradshaw (#4), and D.J. Wagner (#6) is a tremendous haul; it represents three of Kentucky’s 11 highest-rated recruits in 247’s 23-year history. It is also not a guarantee that any of them will be a season-shifting star that completely fulfills what Kentucky could be - a borderline top-10 team - if several things go right. Kentucky did pull in the #1 recruiting class, but this is generally agreed to be the worst year of basketball recruits (relative to general expectation) in a decade if not further back.

Plus, it’s not even a great #1 recruiting class. Kentucky’s average player rating, per 247, is their second-lowest since 2012-13 and the third-lowest of the Calipari era. Is it good that they added four five-stars to their roster? Certainly. Does it guarantee success any more than, say, 2022-23 Arkansas, who also had six blue-chip recruits? It very much does not.

To add to this, the recruiting class would probably feel better if Kentucky were guaranteed to have any returning talent of note. The most experienced returnee, if he chooses to return, is Antonio Reeves; he would be the only junior or senior on the entire roster. With Reeves on the team, and with potential starter-level portal additions very thin at the moment, Torvik projects Kentucky to enter the season 31st. Hoop-Explorer is kinder but still has Kentucky 13th. An average there of 22nd would be UK’s lowest season-opening ranking on KenPom since Calipari took the job.

Of course, projections are just projections. What about how teams like Kentucky - those with good, but not elite talent and minimal experience - have fared in an actual season? Going back to 2012-2013 - aka, 11 years of data - I’ve found 19 teams, all high-majors, who meet a range that fits this current Kentucky team.

• A Torvik Talent Rating between 70 and 85 (UK: 76.5);

• Years of experience below 1 on average (UK: 0.64);

Along with narrowing it down further to 8 teams with the following qualification:

• Who returned 40% or fewer of their minutes from the previous season (UK: 19%).

We’ll break down the larger group first, the smaller group second, and what it may or may not mean for 2023-24 Kentucky at the end.

The larger group features one huge hit, a pair of regional faves…and little else

Remember the 2012-13 Michigan team? The one with Trey Burke, Tim Hardaway Jr., Nik Stauskas, Jordan Morgan, Mitch McGary, etc.? Merely one of the most delightful teams to watch in human history? Yeah, those guys are Kentucky’s highest-end comparison among the larger group here. Those Wolverines entered the year with 0.78 years of average college experience, a talent rating of 74.4, and featured a top-10 recruiting class. It’s not the exact same, but hey, when your upper comparison was a 4-seed that came within a few points of a national title, you’d take it.

The problem with that comparison is that aside from those two basic numbers, it doesn’t line up at all. Here’s the recruiting ratings for Those You May Remember from Michigan:

And here’s 2023-24 Kentucky.

Kentucky is more talented on paper, so hey, how about 2012-13 Michigan with greater talent? That’s gotta be something, right? Sure, but the forgotten aspect of said Michigan team was having multiple starting juniors and a returning sophomore point guard that was the Big Ten Freshman of the Year. Kentucky’s only returner with any notable college stats whatsoever was the sixth man (albeit a very good one) for a 6-seed last season.

The more accurate, and still somewhat rosy, comparison may be last year’s Duke team. That team offered a talent rating in the low 80s and an average experience level of 0.88 years, both of which are better than Kentucky but not by an insane amount. To go with it, Duke also had just 16% of their minutes carry over from 2021-22 to 2022-23, and by the end of the season, four of five starting spots were occupied by freshmen.

That Duke team stumbled a bit to a 5-seed and a Round of 32 exit, but they ripped off nine straight wins to enter the NCAA Tournament and looked like a top-10 team once the Tournament began. That fits the narrative of several Kentucky teams in the past: one who struggles from November through January, yet finds their footing in February and presses the gas in March. Another comp that would be hard to turn down: 2014-15 Kansas, who won 27 games and got a 2 seed.

However, of the 19 teams, those were the only three that finished in the KenPom top 25 at season’s end. The next-best case was 2018-19 Maryland, a fairly un-notable young team that went 23-11 and exited as a 6 seed in the Round of 32. The rest were a wide variety of misses. Only 8 of the 19 teams surveyed actually made the NCAA Tournament, and just two - 2017-18 Syracuse, 2012-13 Michigan - managed to see the second weekend. The combination of low experience and good-not-great talent hasn’t parlayed itself into March success all that often in years past.

Really, the general theme I noticed was a lot of teams that were just…there. The average win percentage of the 19 teams was 59.7%; converted to your typical 31-game schedule, that would put Kentucky at either 18-13 or 19-12 entering the SEC Tournament. More worrisome (to me, at least) was the lack of quality rankings. As a reminder, Torvik currently has Kentucky 31st and Hoop-Explorer 13th. While seven teams at least ranked 32nd or better, only one (said Michigan team) beat that Hoop-Explorer number. Considering the median ranking was 50.5, there’s an argument that even having Kentucky near your Top 25 is a bad idea at the moment.

The narrowed-down group eliminates the worst possible outcomes, but produces a batch of…well, mid

That’s an overly long title for a fairly short section. Here’s the eight teams who met all three requirements - 70-85 talent rating, <1 year of experience, <40% of minutes returning - to be compared to 2023-24 Kentucky.

• 2012-13 Kentucky (60th overall, missed NCAAT)

• 2014-15 Indiana (39th overall, 10 seed, Round of 64)

• 2017-18 Syracuse (47th overall, 11 seed, Sweet Sixteen)

• 2017-18 Texas (32nd overall, 10 seed, Round of 64)

• 2019-20 Memphis (63rd overall, would’ve missed NCAAT)

• 2019-20 Washington (54th overall, would’ve missed NCAAT)

• 2020-21 Duke (32nd overall, missed NCAAT)

• 2022-23 Duke (15th overall, 5 seed, Round of 32)

I’ll ask you: what do you see there? Because I see what I’d politely describe as a batch of almost entirely forgettable teams, save for 2022-23 Duke, who had one excellent month of basketball surrounded by three fairly rough ones. Largely, it’s a laundry list of teams that had either preseason expectations or anticipated better outcomes. Five of the teams here were ranked in the preseason Top 25, with four (2012-13 UK, 2019-20 Memphis, 2020-21 Duke, 2022-23 Duke) being in the top 15. Only one of them - last year’s Duke team - managed to enter the NCAA Tournament as a Top 25 team.

While narrowing down the field eliminated Kentucky’s six worst comparisons from the initial batch of 19, it also eliminated three of their top four we mentioned earlier. The average ranking of these eight teams was 42.8; their average record over a 31-game regular season was 19-12. Exactly one of the eight teams was better than a 10 seed.

Possibly most notable is how and where these teams struggled. While the average offense was better than the average defense, it’s largely driven by a 2014-15 Indiana team that could score or allow 85 in any game. Defenses, pound-for-pound, generally seemed to be a little ahead of the offense, which struggled mightily aside from the two Duke teams and Indiana. The scariest comparison among those that actually made the Big Dance might be 2017-18 Texas: a team that wasn’t preseason Top 25 but got a fair bit of noise, had a top-15 defense, and wasted it because no one could make a shot.

2023-24 Kentucky is their own thing, but the previous things in comparison don’t exactly produce optimism

It’s worth noting, obviously, that 2023-24 Kentucky would be the ninth data point in an 11-year set of eight. This is a tiny, tiny sample size, and considering the larger group of 19 did product at least one gigantic success, you could point to that as reason for Kentucky fans to still feel reasonably rosy about the upcoming season. After all, Calipari has one thing my beloved John Beilein still does not: a championship ring.

The problem is that it’s one obvious success in a batch of 19, and said success didn’t qualify for the group of eight we took a closer look at. Only three of the 19 teams surveyed won more than 68% of their games. That may be of no note to you, but to a Kentucky fan, that should be alarming. The median Kentucky team, across all of program history, has won 77% of its games. One of those 19 - 2012-13 Michigan - did the same. A 68% win rate would be the 82nd-best in program history; the average win rate of 61% of that second group would barely crack the top 100.

Of course, I don’t think any Kentucky fan would care as long as said 19-12 season resulted in a surprise Final Four run. Even an Elite Eight run would be cherished, as the current four-season drought is the longest Kentucky has faced in over 30 years. If Calipari can deliver - and really, if they can just manage to make it to November with Antonio Reeves on the roster - maybe Kentucky won’t be all that bad. But if they hit that average of the 43rd-best team in America…if they’re a 10 or 11 seed…well, Kentucky fans will have all the more reason to potentially be rooting for a breakup.