John Calipari (SEC Photo)
In the summer when the wind picks up and the leaves on the trees turn over to show their silvery underside a person can tell a storm is coming. There’s just something about the way the wind blows that says there is a storm on the horizon.
That’s the way the Kentucky basketball program feels right now. There is a storm on the horizon. Sure, it may not seem exactly like that now but the smell of a storm is in the air. The winds of change are beginning to blow across the entire program. A little history lesson might better explain what I mean.
John Calipari has been the basketball coach at UK since 2009. That’s a total of 12 seasons. He came in with a tremendous amount of fanfare and immediately lifted the program from the pit it had fallen into during the debacle that was the two years Billy Gillespie coached in Lexington. Calipari recruited extremely well, brought in many top five high school players and eventually won a National Championship with what I like to refer to as the “Anthony Davis” team in 2012.
He had an excellent shot to have an undefeated National Championship team in 2015 but unfortunately bowed out in the Final Four to Wisconsin in a game where he seemed to be outcoached in every phase of the game. That ultra-talented team finished 38-1. That was probably the final peak for the program under Calipari and from that point on it has been a steady slog downhill.
Don’t get me wrong. Kentucky has had a couple of very good years since then — like the D’Aaron Fox team in 2017 that won 30-plus games and reached the Elite Eight — but in general it feels like the air is slowly leaving the balloon. Calipari continues to mostly miss on top five players, his style of play has become, as some say, “dated” at best and some would say archaic at worst. He continues to play to the crowd in his press conferences but it now seems more like a bronc rider that has aged and can no longer completely stay on the horse.
Too many hits, coming back to back to back, seem to have turned the program in the wrong direction and this season seems to be the final straw. Am I saying that John Calipari’s job at Kentucky is in jeopardy and he may lose it? Absolutely not. What I am saying is that, like that bronc rider, Calipari is somewhat of a showman and when the entertainment value begins to wear thin with the crowd he moves on to another venue where he is considered more “entertaining.”
Case in point are his previous stops at University of Massachusetts and Memphis. Starting in 1988 Calipari put UMass out in front as a basketball powerhouse through his efforts to bring in “blue collar” players that played well together. He struck gold with big man Marcus Camby surrounded by a collection of hardworking players that took that 1995-1996 team all the way to the Final Four. Unfortunately Camby took payments from agents to the tune of $28,000 and all that team’s wins were vacated. As the dust settled from that massive blow-up and with the fans disenchanted with how it all ended John Calipari rode on to the next rodeo. That would be the New York Nets in the NBA.
He would be the head coach of the Nets for three seasons before he was fired from the Nets in the beginning of the 1999 season and finished with an overall record of 72-112 in the NBA.
He then bounced around as an assistant in the NBA until he landed the head coaching position at Memphis in 2000. He immediately upgraded the Tigers’ program, brought them national prominence through multiple 20 win seasons, a trip to the NCAA Final and coached several players that later starred in the NBA. Unfortunately one of those players, Derrick Rose, had his SAT score invalidated by the testing company and was declared ineligible after the 2008 season. In Calipari’s last season at Memphis he, Derrick Rose and the University were threatened with a lawsuit by season ticket holders because of the vacated Final Four season in 2008 and ultimately settled out of court. In 2009 John Calipari, under a cloud of fan suspicion and frustration, left Memphis and rode east to take the head coaching job at Kentucky.
Now, I know that was a long trip down memory lane but it was necessary to set the stage for where we are today. History shows that in each stop that Calipari has made — except the Nets job — he has voluntarily left the position after 8-10 years when some event or group of events begins to take the shine off the brass ring. At UMass it was the Marcus Camby fiasco. In Memphis it was the disappointment and embarrassment from the Derrick Rose situation. In both cases he left on less than stellar terms as far as the fans were concerned.
Now he is at UK in his 12th season and his current team is sitting at 4-8 with virtually no chance to make this year’s NCAA Tournament. He has seen his national prominence slowly decline over time since 2016 with difficult and sometimes inexplicable losses in the Elite 8 twice, Sweet 16 once and the round of 32 once.
After the season in 2020 where his team finished 25-6 and had no NCAA appearance due to the Covid-19 cancellation he saw his entire roster, except one player, turn over either through an exit to the NBA or transfer to another school.
Now, enter the 2020-2021 season. Calipari, with a roster full of all new players which included transfer players from Creighton, Wake Forest and Rhode Island plus the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation, started the season off 1-6, losing to the likes of Richmond, Georgia Tech and Notre Dame. BJ Boston, Calipari’s top five recruit and a player considered to be a lock lottery pick in next year’s NBA Draft started the season off in horrible form, at one point shooting 35 percent from the field and 15 percent from 3-point range. The Wildcats have suffered a 20-point loss at Rupp Arena to Alabama, three losses in Rupp Arena in the same season, a six-game losing streak that has never been seen before at UK in the modern era and extreme fan disenchantment for what is happening to the Kentucky basketball culture.
Between the losing, the unrest due to the team’s kneeling protest during the national anthem at Florida, fans unhappiness with Calipari’s unwillingness to play players that are playing well while he continues to play his highly regarded but poorly performing recruits and his seeming stubbornness that prevents him from changing his offensive schemes to better allow his team to win, he looks a lot like the bronc rider that can’t stay on the horse. Each time the animal bucks Calipari seems to get thrown off and hit the dirt and, even though he gets up and dusts himself off, at 61 years old it becomes harder and harder to climb back on.
Take the fans’ disenchantment with Calipari’s recruiting philosophy of “one-and-done.” Everything was great early when he was recruiting players like Demarcus Cousins, John Wall, Anthony Davis and Karl Anthony-Towns but when he had a couple of misses like he has had this year with Boston and Terrance Clarke the philosophy starts to wear thin on the fan base and they have become more and more vocal in expressing their dissatisfaction.
About his currently unpopular recruiting philosophy he has said in the past, “Let me say this: I’ve had 20-some lottery picks and every one of them has gotten to a second contract because they have been prepared to go in the league and do well,” Calipari said. “It’s a coach’s choice to recruit these kinds of kids. If you want four-year guys, then recruit four-year guys. If you’re old school and you’ve been following college basketball and you liked it with kids staying in four years and all that, then you’ll probably say this has ruined what my game used to look like.”
And that’s exactly what a lot of Kentucky fans are saying today – he has ruined the game at UK.
And it seems that his constant reinforcement about Kentucky being a player’s first program has finally rubbed many fans the wrong way. He always says that the players’ welfare and development come before anything else. Everything is orchestrated to benefit the player’s growth and development. Sometimes that philosophy wins a lot of games, sometimes it doesn’t. D’Aaron Fox, one of Calipari’s former players, said about his philosophy towards players and winning, “Cal couldn’t give a damn about winning college basketball games. If he’s getting guys who he knows he can end up developing into NBA players, you’re automatically going to win 30 games a year just from that alone. That’s what I loved.”
Unfortunately it doesn’t always work that way. This year’s team has probably five or more players that will eventually be average or better in the NBA. But as a team they are probably the worst team to ever wear the blue and white for Kentucky. At the end of this season or next, several of them will walk out the door never to return to the UK campus, while next year the fans will come back hoping to see a team of players that will represent the University first and the name on the back of the jersey second.
Those are just a few examples of what seems to be rubbing a larger and larger contingent of Big Blue Nation the wrong way. Some of it is coaching, some of it is philosophical but all if it is about winning. It’s about putting your team in the best position to compete for championships. John Calipari understands that, he just doesn’t always agree with it.
So there is the dichotomy, fans want to win games and advance in the playoffs (NCAA Tournament), John Calipari wants to change lives. It seems that the longer it goes the farther apart those two goals seem to be. As the Kentucky Basketball fan base continues to wallow in the misery of a losing season the likes of which they have never seen before John Vincent Calipari seems to continue to believe that winning games is not of paramount importance.
It is important, but not the “be all, end-all” of a college basketball program. He said as much after the 66-59 road loss to Auburn on Saturday. Calipari said, when asked why he didn’t play certain bench players more in the second half when those players had played better than the starting five, “I want to win every game we coach, but the other side of it is I’m not trying to take anyone’s heart away.”
And there in lies one of the many complex problems with the John Calipari program as it exists today and why it seems to be in trouble.
In my next article I’ll explain why I believe the storm clouds that are gathering won’t go away and where I see this program heading next year.
