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4/16/2024 BASKETBALL
Pope offers hints of Cats’ new style
Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart welcomed former Wildcat national champion Mark Pope as the 23rd head coach in program history during Sunday’s public introductory press conference at Rupp Arena.
Kentucky Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart welcomed former Wildcat national champion Mark Pope as the 23rd head coach in program history during Sunday’s public introductory press conference at Rupp Arena. (Clare Grant/USA Today Sports)
Jeff Drummond • CatsIllustrated
Managing Editor
@JDrumUK
While Sunday’s introductory press conference was pure spectacle, Mark Pope’s first weekly radio show as the new head coach at Kentucky offered a glimpse into what Big Blue Nation might see from the Wildcats on the floor next season.
During his hour-long conversation with the UK Sports Network’s Tom Leach, Pope was asked by a fan to outline some of the keys to the offensive scheme he will bring with him from BYU.
“They are top-secret,” Pope deadpanned.
“It’s going to be a long show,” Leach replied after an awkward moment of dead air.
Of course, the affable Pope wanted to talk about the style that helped BYU rank among the national leaders in scoring, 3-point shooting, and offensive efficiency this season. And once he got started, it was difficult to slow down his self-professed “super-dorky” enthusiasm.
“I love studying the game of basketball,” said Pope, whom UK AD Mitch Barnhart described as perhaps the first Rhodes Scholar candidate he’s ever interviewed. “… It’s really a font of creativity, and it’s been really fun to watch the evolution of the game.”
Pope has watched the game evolve from a post-dominated physical battle into the pick-and-roll chess match prominent in recent years and is now morphing into a challenge of wide-open spacing that often features all five players away from the paint.
“They’re all in motion, all reading each other without the ball,” Pope said of the new concept triumphed by Steve Kerr with the Golden State Warriors.
“It’s an exhilarating way to play,” he added. “It’s the elite level of teamwork right now. If you think of all the thankless jobs in basketball, one of them is to be a great cutter. Great cutters — I tell our players this all the time — great cutters get paid in the game of basketball right now. A lot of times you may end up running all over the floor, and you may not get the ball, but you’re creating space and actions and opportunities for your teammates, and that’s a huge fundamental key of our offense.”
BYU ranked 14th in the Ken Pomeroy efficiency rankings last season. The Cougars were No. 2 nationally in percentage of points scored (41%) via the 3-point arc. If it wasn’t a trey, chances are Pope’s squad was getting a layup, sharing similarities with the current Alabama system employed by fellow analytic enthusiast Nate Oats.
“Forcing people to guard 27 by 50 feet is really important to us,” Pope said. “… We feel like that forces teams to guard more space than anybody else in the country does.”
Defensively, it sounds like the Cats may feature even more of a drastic departure than what fans saw from John Calipari’s strict man-to-man approach.
“What we found over time was there were little spaces during the course of the game where we could change it up,” Pope said. “As we kind of read the data and how it was functioning for us, we could take opportunities — we call them ‘punches,’ like a punch after a timeout or after a dead ball or sometimes in live play — where we give a drastically different look, and sometimes that can force teams to be a little bit back on their heels where you’re not getting their most aggressive posturing.
“It’s a little bit high-risk, high-reward, but I feel like we found a real pulse on it where we’re comfortable with it. We actually chart where we’re able to keep teams off-balance and how many possessions there are with a lasting effect, even with just a one-punch possession. We’re trying to think of ways where we can distract teams from just being downhill all the time.”
Despite featuring far less athleticism, length, and size than UK did this season, BYU ranked 60th in defensive efficiency, while the Cats had one of the worst figures of the Calipari era at 109.
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