It has been a wild off-season for the Kentucky basketball program as John Calipari left and Mark Pope has taken over as the new head coach.
Every player from last year’s team left for the portal, or NBA Draft, and all of the recruiting class aside from Travis Perry left, so Coach Pope had a lot of rebuilding to do this offseason.
He has done that and some as Coach Pope brought in an elite transfer portal class full of veteran talent like Lamont Butler, Kerr Kriisa, Jaxson Robinson, Andrew Carr, and Koby Brea.
David Connelly of Sports Grid listed the top 45 most-improved basketball teams this offseason, and Kentucky was third on his list.
Connelly had this to say about why the Wildcats were one of the teams who improved the most in the transfer portal, “Not only did Mark Pope reel in a monstrous crowd to Rupp Arena during his coronation as the next head coach at Kentucky, but he has also done a phenomenal job setting the program up for immediate success in 2024-25. The Wildcats have landed five elite portal prospects in Andrew Carr, Otega Oweh, Lamont Butler, and centers Amari Williams and Brandon Garrison. With seven outgoing transfers and the graduation of program cornerstone Antonio Reeves, there is no better way to get on the good side of Big Blue Nation than to bring in a star-studded transfer class to reload rather than rebuild.”
During the Calipari era, Kentucky was full of young five-star talent. Under Coach Pope, Kentucky will be full of veteran talent with a healthy mix of those five-star freshmen. Coach Pope has this Kentucky basketball team ready to compete right away.