Kentucky basketball additions under Mark Pope lauded for balance on offense, defense

LEXINGTON — Until the games begin later this year, it’s impossible to know how good Kentucky basketball will be defensively. But one can project. If nothing else, it will be hard for the Wildcats to be much worse than they were during the 2023-24 campaign. In the final season of John Calipari’s 15-year run guiding the program, UK had one of its worst defensive clubs in history.

Opponents averaged just shy of 80 points per game, finishing at 79.7 per contest. That ranked as the fourth-most points per game UK has allowed, and the worst since 1989-90, when it gave up a single-season program mark of 87.9.

The players Mark Pope has added since becoming coach provide hope on that end of the floor. Each of Kentucky’s first four transfer portal additions — guards Lamont Butler (San Diego State) and Otega Oweh (Oklahoma), forward Amari Williams (Drexel) and center Brandon Garrison (Oklahoma State) — were known more for their defense than their offense at their previous stops.

Evan Miyakawa, a basketball statistician who owns and operates the analytics website EvanMiya.com, is a believer in UK’s defensive potential.

“You look at the transfer class, I think it’s pretty balanced between offensive and defensive,” Miyakawa said of the Wildcats’ nine-man transfer haul, “but they went defense first, and I love that, because that means you’re going to build your team around guys who are really reliable defensively, and then they can kind of build the offensive system however they want.

“I think this team is going to be really good defensively.”

That quartet of Butler, Garrison, Oweh and Williams is what makes Miyakawa cautiously optimistic.

“The top four guys or so in defensive rating all grade out as being a lot better than most of the players Kentucky has had, even in recent seasons. … And I think that’s really going to show that this team is going to be much more reliable defensively than maybe we’ve seen Kentucky teams be previously,” he said.

Butler especially brings defensive bona…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/kentucky-basketball-additions-under-mark-091625144.html

Author : The Courier Journal

Publish date : 2024-07-25 09:16:25

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.