Nearly an hour into his final radio show of the season and apparently aware of how some fans might be digesting everything he’d been saying on the air, Mark Pope paused for clarification. “Listen, this is not an excuse fest,” the Kentucky basketball coach said. “We know where we need to go. This is just explaining the facts of where we are.” At that moment, Pope was explaining why his second UK basketball team, which saw its season come to an end the previous day, hadn’t shot nearly as many 3-pointers as he’d hoped. But much of the show to that point had been a defense of the path this UK program is on. Whether individual fans viewed Pope’s hourlong presentation as one filled with legitimate reasons for the Cats’ failure to live up to preseason expectations — or the “excuse fest” that he denied it was — likely depended on those fans’ opinion of the Kentucky coach before the show began, but the facts he laid out were valid. And many of them were related to UK’s situation at point guard.
The play at that position has not gone according to plan in either of Pope’s two seasons as Kentucky’s head coach, and the circumstances have been largely beyond his control. In Year 1, he managed to pluck Lamont Butler and Kerr Kriisa out of the transfer portal. Landing two high-major talents at the same position — and getting Kriisa, a starter at Arizona and West Virginia, to go along with being Butler’s backup as a senior — was viewed as a coup. Kriisa suffered a season-ending injury in December, while Butler injured his shoulder multiple times throughout the season and played the NCAA Tournament at far less than 100% health. In Year 2, Pope got a commitment from Pittsburgh point guard Jaland Lowe, with highly touted recruit Acaden Lewis already signed and destined for a backup role in his freshman season. But Lowe was injured in the preseason — playing nine games at far less than 100% — before being ruled out for the rest of the season in January. And Lewis decommitted not long after Lowe picked the Cats. The injuries, as Pope pointed out Monday, could not have been foreseen. “It’s not soft tissue stuff that’s holding our guys out of games,” he said on the radio show. “It’s not stability. It’s not strength stuff. It’s been random things.” And that’s true. The types of injuries that have hindered UK’s point guard play in both seasons — as well as the one that knocked a red-hot Jaxson Robinson out for the season last year — have been random occurrences that happened to players with no extensive injury history. One of the facts Pope offered up Monday night: His teams have played 72 games over the past two seasons, and only 10 have been played with a full roster.
In 56 games against power-conference teams, he said, only five featured Kentucky’s full complement of players. “And that is a real thing,” he said. “That’s been a real issue for us.” Nowhere has it been more glaring than at point guard, and while Pope paused on multiple occasions to say he didn’t want what he was saying to come off as “excuses,” he knows as well as anyone that Kentucky must get it right at that position for the upcoming season.
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