Since his arrival in Lexington in 2009, John Calipari has signed an unprecedented 58 five-star prospects and received 47 NBA draft picks, including 35 first-rounders. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images))This summer, Calipari reunited with Chuck Martin, who was with him at Memphis throughout the Tigers’ three consecutive Elite Eights and national title run. He enlisted the help of John Welch, a well-known NBA coach and player development expert. Calipari also hired a video coordinator with NBA expertise, who formerly worked at San Diego State.
Calipari stated that Martin is “going to be tremendous for us” and has already “had an impact on our recruiting.” Kentucky recently signed its first five-star recruit for the 2024 class. Welch “helped me.”
Calipari’s primary need will always be talent. This season, he has signed an old-school recruiting class that ranks No. 1 nationally, including five-star Justin Edwards, Aaron Bradshaw, DJ Wagner, and Rob Dillingham. He went against his nature the last two years, attempting to win with transfer-heavy rosters and older teams, but Calipari has finally returned to the young movement that made him renowned. This roster has eight freshmen and only two seniors.
“If you ask me talent or experience, I’m taking talent, and the talent usually figures it out,” Calipari remarked during media day last week. “Look, I am not changing. I’m going to recruit the best freshmen player I can find. You may say, ‘It’s not going to
Everything we’ve seen from these Wildcats thus far, from a four-game exhibition romp in Canada to a rollicking series of preseason highlights, suggests Calipari is going to play a more modern brand of basketball. That could be purely out of necessity, as none of the Wildcats’ three 7-footers has been available, but the coach appears to be getting comfortable playing with pace and space, five-out and firing away from deep.
The college basketball world remains skeptical. Kentucky has its lowest preseason ranking ever under Calipari – 16th – and is picked to finish fourth in the SEC.
Still, maybe Calipari, at this late stage, can lead a revival.
Just last summer, he ranted to the program’s local television partner about how important it was to make Big Blue Madness, the famous preseason basketball extravaganza and UK’s premier recruiting event of the year, great again. Once a must-see spectacle, Madness had become stale. “You can say, ‘It’s not that big a deal.’ It could (impress) one player and that one player can help you win a national title,” Calipari told WLEX-TV. “That John Wall stuff and that Madness got us Anthony Davis. You gotta be talking about Madness for a month or we didn’t do our job. It’s unacceptable.”
So what did Calipari and Kentucky deliver for Madness in 2023? The least-exciting event to date. There was no viral dance like Wall’s in 2009, no Drake in the layup line like 2014 — or Drake on the video board introducing Calipari in 2015, or Drake wearing a “Kentucky Dad” hoodie on the bench in 2017 — no Michael Buffer like 2016 or even Bruce Buffer like 2019. There were no braggadocious lines like Calipari’s oft-repeated, “We do more than move the needle; we are the needle” from 2011.
This year, former star DeMarcus Cousins introduced Calipari — “The GOAT. Y’all better put some respect on his name” — and an increasingly gray-headed man ambled onto the stage, not in one of his signature Italian suits, but in a UK pullover and jeans. Calipari addressed the crowd for less than a minute. The only shorter Madness appearance by him was in 2014, alongside Drake, when he simply said, “Enough talking, let’s ball,” and literally dropped the microphone.
This was not that. “Let’s watch these guys play and enjoy it,” Calipari said, with minimal enthusiasm, “and let’s get on with this.”
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