25 College Basketball Teams in 25 Days: No. 7 Kentucky Wildcats
By Chris Stone
Since taking over the Kentucky Wildcats ahead of the 2009-10 season, head coach John Calipari has helped produce 21 one-and-done freshmen, creating a perpetual state of roster transition in the Bluegrass State.
Entering 2017-18, Calipari is facing one of his biggest rebuilds with only one player on the team, Wenyen Gabriel, who averaged double-figure minutes last season. Two others, Sacha Killeya-Jones and Tai Wynyard, played sparingly. The bulk of the Wildcats’ rotation will be filled with freshmen, including six 5-stars and a pair of 4-star recruits.
On it’s face, restocking the roster in this way each year hasn’t had much of an effect on success for Calipari and the Wildcats. Kentucky’s made the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament in six of his eight seasons at the helm. The program has also added a quartet Final Four banners and a national title to its trophy case during that stretch. A pair of freshmen, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Anthony Davis, were the highlights of the 2012 championship team. That the Wildcats have produced this level of success showcases just how much of an outlier they are in the college basketball landscape.
A little over a ago, Ken Pomeroy created a statistic meant to measure roster continuity, but he didn’t want it to be a strict measurement of returning minutes from the season before because that failed to account for new roles that old players might be put in. He came up with a statistic he calls “minutes continuity,” designed to measure how many minutes played in the team’s current season were played by the same players last season. This graphic might help explain it more clearly:
Pomeroy found that greater minutes continuity was typically associated with better on court performances, noting that teams with a higher percentage of returning minutes were often better on both ends of the floor than those without. The relationship between continuity and overall adjusted efficiency margin is a positive one. The below chart, which plots minutes continuity and adjusted efficiency margin for every team in Division I over the last three years, explains the relationship. Simply follow the trend line:
Kentucky, it seems, has been the outlier. The Wildcats have only once come close to the national average in minutes continuity and they regularly reside in the bottom right quadrant in charts like the one above with a low minutes continuity number and a high adjusted efficiency margin mark. Dig a bit deeper, though, and minutes continuity appears to matter at Kentucky in its own way, too.
Remember that national title team? It had Kidd-Gilchrist and Davis and Marquis Teague running the point, but it also featured big roles for returnees Terrence Jones, Doron Lamb and Darius Miller. It had the second highest minutes continuity score for a Kentucky team during the Calipari era.
How about the 2014-15 squad that remains the best college basketball team of the KenPom era? It’s often remembered for its one-and-dones, including Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker and Trey Lyles, but the rest of the roster was littered with experienced players who shared the court a year before. Those Wildcats have the highest minutes continuity number of the Calipari era at 49.6 percent.
Although it’s a super small sample of just eight seasons, Kentucky under Calipari appears to have benefited — at least in terms of adjusted efficiency margin — from having minutes continuity of some sort:
And that’s what figures to make Kentucky’s 2017-18 season such an interesting challenge. Calipari must figure out what to do with basically an entirely new batch of players; figure out how they fit together, figure out what they’re good at and figure out how to maximize them in rotations.
The head coach will face some constraints as he draws up his offense, primarily with regards to how well the current roster can shoot the ball. None of the teams guards, including Quade Green, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Hamidou Diallo, are likely to be true shooting threats. The hope is that at least one of them can make 3s at a reasonable clip to provide some floor-spacing. Kevin Knox may have a chance to be serviceable on the wing as a combo forward, but he was more voluminous than accurate with his 3-point shot in high school. Jarred Vanderbilt — once he gets healthy — offers very little upside from beyond the arc and P.J. Washington is largely an interior scorer. Gabriel is potentially the best of the forward bunch and he made just 31.7 percent of his 3-point attempts last season, enough to be a threat as a stretch power forward, but far from average.
Still, Kentucky’s roster will be as long and athletic as any in college hoops and those misses may amplify one of the team’s potential biggest strengths. These Wildcats should be terrors on the offensive boards because they’ll be taller than nearly every opponent at about every position. Although offensive rebounding has fallen out of favor, generally speaking, in college basketball, Calipari should be positioned to take advantage of it with this particular roster.
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That length and athleticism should also translate on the defensive end where the Wildcats have ranked in the top 10 nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency four times under Calipari. Kentucky’s 2017-18 roster features a slew of versatile options who should be able to pressure opposing offenses with switches, taking away their best looks.
Given their youth, it is almost a certainty that this collection of Wildcats will experience some growing pains as they seek out their own identity. It’s in those moments where the lack of continuity will be most obvious. For Kentucky to be as good as many project, they’ll need to buck the minutes continuity trend that’s manifested itself in Lexington and across college basketball.