For his part, Calipari wants everyone to know just how hard that will be. On an ESPN series laughably entitled, “Kentucky Basketball — Inside Access,” Calipari gets to look into various cameras and repeatedly tell viewers how inexperienced his team is, how average his players look right now and how hard he is going to work to make them better.
Putting aside Calipari’s talk about how his one-and-done players are still “student-athletes” and how he’s just at Kentucky to try to make their lives better, here are some indisputable facts:
●Calipari is a superb basketball coach. He proved it at Massachusetts, where he took a losing team and went to the Final Four. He did it again at Memphis, coming within seconds of a national title in 2008. Of course, technically, neither of those Final Four appearances happened because some of his minions occasionally colored outside the lines. It doesn’t change the coaching job he did.
●He can charm almost anyone when he wants to: recruits and their families and “support groups” and, especially, anyone carrying a TV camera. Calipari once looked at an ESPN camera and said, with a straight face, that playing on “Game Night” was a major step forward for Kentucky basketball, which at the time had won just seven national titles.
●He’s going to have the best recruiting class in the country every year. Why? Because the best high school players want to drive thru college as fast as they can en route to the NBA. Calipari didn’t invent the one-and-done rule, but he has used it better than anyone. Recruits know he’ll get them through the line as fast as possible.
●He isn’t going anywhere soon. Some think Calipari might be tempted to return to the NBA, where he failed pretty emphatically years ago in New Jersey. Not happening. He’s too smart for that. Plus, even if someone offers him $10 million a year, the good people of Kentucky will round up whatever it takes to keep him. He may not last as long as Queen Elizabeth, but he’ll be around for a while.
There are college basketball teams other than Kentucky, which opens the season Friday night in Brooklyn against Maryland. This may not sound like a brilliant move for Terps second-year Coach Mark Turgeon, who played at Kansas when Calipari was an assistant under Larry Brown.
“I think it’s good scheduling,” Turgeon said. “Get them early, and at the same time, let our new guys find out right away about how talented an opponent can be.”
Given the rest of Maryland’s non-conference schedule, a game against a talented team starting out is probably a good idea. The Terrapins could easily be 11-1 entering ACC play in January.
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