Killing a little time before Tuesday night’s showdown with Florida and came across a couple of stories worth sharing with the loyal readers of CoachCal.com
John Gasaway from ESPN presents an interesting debate as to which of John Calipari’s team is the most impressive. Comparing this year’s Kentucky team to Coach Cal’s first two at UK, plus his 2007-08 team at Memphis, Gasaway thinks this might be his best yet.
It’s an ESPN Insider story, so you’ll have to pay to read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
I don’t mean “most dominant” within its own conference, because Kentucky will be hard pressed to bulldoze this year’s SEC the way Calipari’s Memphis teams used to simply blow away the rest of Conference USA. For example, Calipari’s 2007-08 team, the one led by Derrick Rose and Chris Douglas-Roberts, outscored C-USA by 0.29 points per trip. While UK’s current scoring margin in SEC play is more or less identical (0.28 points per possession), the calendar says it’s early February and the Wildcats have the meat of their schedule still to come.
No, I mean simply if I had to choose two of Calipari’s teams to square off for the title of Coach Cal’s best ever, I’d match up this group with that 2007-08 team. The scoring margins recorded by both are way beyond anything we saw from Calipari’s first two teams in Lexington, and you might remember those teams reached the 2010 Elite Eight and 2011 Final Four, respectively. Right now, I would rate Anthony Davis & Co. as the strongest of Calipari’s three Kentucky teams. That’s how good they’ve been to this point.
In Jason King’s weekly “King’s Court” column he writes for ESPN, he makes an argument for Coach Cal to be in the running for National Coach of the Year.
It wouldn’t be the first time Calipari has earned the distinction — he most recently won the award in 2010 as the Adolph Rupp National Coach of the Year winner — but it would shed some light on the job he’s done taking superstars and getting them to buy into the team.
Why isn’t John Calipari being mentioned as a national coach of the year candidate?
Good question. Calipari definitely deserves to be in the mix. The Wildcats may be loaded with talent, but that doesn’t make Calipari’s job easy. Most kids that view college as a one-year pitstop on the way to the NBA care more about their stats and success than they do about playing team basketball and playing defense. Calipari is one of the few coaches who can make one-and-done players realize the importance of those things and embrace them. You’ll never see a Calipari player average 20 points a game. Instead it’s always four or give guys averaging between 10 and 15 points for a national championship contender. The most telling stat about Calipari, though, is this one: Kentucky currently leads the nation in field goal percentage defense. Opponents are shooting just 35.6 percent against the Wildcats. That’s coaching. People shouldn’t discount the job Calipari has done just because he has a talented team.
I haven’t posted ESPN’s Bracketology all that much lately, in part because everyone knows the Cats are a No. 1 seed if the tournament started today, but for those who love this type of stuff, here is this week’s version.
Louisville continues to be the likely destination for Kentucky’s first two games, Joe Lunardi thinks. He has the Cats playing in the South Region, the final two games of which will be played in Atlanta.
Because Syracuse’s strength of schedule is stronger to this date than UK’s Lunardi lists Syracuse as the No. 1 overall seed, with the Cats at No. 2 overall. He gives UK a 75-percent chance of holding on to one of the coveted top seeds.
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