When are we finally going to give Kentucky coach John Calipari credit for being one of the best coaches in the modern history of college basketball?
We saw it in 1993 and 1996 with UMass, with Memphis in 2008 and now again at Kentucky, where he has taken the Cats’ program back to the same heights not seen since in the Adolph Rupp and Rick Pitino eras.
Since arriving in the Blue Grass in 2010, Calipari has coached Kentucky to an NCAA Elite Eight his first year, a Final Four in 2011, a national championship in 2012 and a third Final Four in four years this season. He has made the Cats a perennial contender for a national championship.
But no one saw his latest masterpiece coming, especially after his young team of five freshman starters– forwards Julius Randle and James Young, center Dakari Johnson and twin guards Andrew and Aaron Harrison suffered an embarrassing loss to last place South Carolina in an SEC game where Calipari was ejected. The Cats lost 10 games in the regular season for a second consecutive year and entered the tournament as an eighth-seed playing in the most difficult region in the tournament.
Calipari has always been a lightning rod ever since his 1996 UMass team had to vacate its Final Four finish because its All American center Marcus Camby was found to have committed NCAA violations. Twelve years later, Memphis had to vacate its national championship game finish after the same thing happened to All American freshman guard Derrick Rose. Critics were reluctant to give Calipari for rebuilding one program from the ashes, rejuvenated a stagnant program and meeting the often unrealistic expectations of the Big Blue nation, who feel it is Kentucky’s birth right to advance to a Final Four every year.
The Cats never lack fo talent. Calipari is as good as any recruiter in the country because he still loves the chase. And it is hard to question his individual player development. There are at least eight players on this roster who should find spots on an NBA roster.
Calipari’s entire coaching philosophy — which includes constantly reloading with one and dones– was put on trial this season after he said the goal for this team, which had the best recruiting class in the country, was to go 40-0 and then suggested Kentucky was the most scrutinized team in the world when he was put under the microscope.
To his credit, Calipari never gave up this team, never stopped working to make them better in practice and finally solved the riddle of getting a young, talented but often dysfunctional team to play for each other at the most important time in the season.
“It’s a process. Every year it’s a process,” Calipari said. “Some guys get it quicker than others. It took these guys a little longer, and it took me a little longer to figure them out.
You know, we played six‑‑ no, we played seven freshmen today, didn’t we? We played seven freshmen in that game. And it took me a while to figure them out.
So it’s not all them. They were trying. Loving the grind, learning to work, becoming self‑disciplined. Counting on one another, being their brother’s keeper, all that stuff. Losing themselves in the team.
“It’s hard when all seven of them scored 28 a game in high school to give up something and then you’re looking at the other guy, and when they all just settled in and lost themselves in the team, the game became easier. They became better. They had more fun. They became more confident. And all of a sudden this is what you have. But it took us four months.”
Just like 2011, when the Cats, who were a four seed, defeated both Ohio State and North Carolina in the East Regional, Calipari has found a way to put the Cats back in the spotlight, defeating Kansas State and top seeded, then 35-0 Wichita State in the St. Louis sub-regional, then motivated them to a pair of victories over bitter Blue Grass rival Louisville and Big Ten regular season champion Michigan in the Midwest Regional at Indianapolis. The Cats rallied from a seven point deficit in the final four minutes to defeat the Ville, 74-69, in a game where they only had the lead for 65 seconds in the semi-finals, then got by Michigan, 75-72 in the finals when Aaron Harrison, who hadn’t scored a field goal until 6:33 to play, made four in a row, nailing a 24-foot, step back three for the game winner with just four seconds to play.
“We showed a lot of toughness,” Harrison said. “We’re just a group of tough young guys, doesn’t matter about the age or anything anymore. We just try to go out and fight and keep our heads down and swing the whole game, and we just fight so hard.”
The Cats had to fight through adversity in Indy when 7-0 shot blocking center Willie Cauley-Stein suffered a severe ankle injury early in the first half against Louisville. Johnson stepped up against the Cards to score 15 points and six rebounds. Then, against Michigan, wiry 6-9 forward Marcus Lee, a highly decorated freshman who made the McDonald’s All American game but couldn’t crack the rotation and had only scored 15 points since January, came off the to score 10 points, grab eight rebounds, block two shots in 15 minutes, punctuating his performance with six rim rattling dunks.
“At the start of the season, I started reading what everybody was writing. I’m thinking: This is going to be easy,” Calipari said..
“This was very difficult for all of us. It was difficult because my choice coaching them was to allow them the body language, the effort less than it needed to be, the focus less than it needed to be, at times selfishness. And now I became a little mean because we had to get it changed.
“And the other thing I kept telling them: You’ve gotta fail fast, which means go play and don’t be afraid to make mistakes so we can see what we have to do.
But at the end of the day, like I try to do with all my teams, you could see this team is empowered right now. It’s their team. It’s not my team. And I’m just there to maybe call a timeout to settle them down, to pick them up, to sit guys out when they’re not doing what they need to do for their team. That’s my job right now.
“Their job is to go play and have a ball playing, and that’s what they’re doing right now.”
