The commitment to Kentucky by Fairleigh Dickinson forward Ansley Almonor as a transfer Thursday morning brings the number of scholarship players for Mark Pope’s first UK team up to 11.
A 6-foot-7, 219-pound forward, Almonor is a career 38.5 percent 3-point shooter. The product of Spring Valley, New York, a senior-to-be, should give Pope an ideal option when the new UK coach wishes to deploy a “small ball” 4 man.
As to the larger picture, in a podcast interview this week with Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports, Pope expressed the desire to enter 2024-25 with 13 scholarship players — the NCAA maximum for men’s basketball — on the first Wildcats roster he will coach.
During these impatient times, it is reasonable to wonder whether a head man can keep a 13-man roster engaged and happy. Based upon his past, however, Pope would be near the top of the list among the coaches best equipped to make good use of a large roster.
In his tenure as head coach at BYU, Mark Pope used such deep rotations that there were only six times in five seasons that the Cougars had a player average more than 30 minutes a game. Rob Gray USA TODAY NETWORK
Like his college coach at UK, Rick Pitino, Pope is a believer in using his bench. Consider: ▪
Over his prior two seasons as head man at BYU, Pope has not had one player average 30 minutes of playing time a game. ▪
For both of the past two years, Pope deployed a 10-man rotation. In 2022-23, BYU’s 10 rotation players averaged between 10.2 and 29 minutes of action a game. This past season, the range of average playing time for the Cougars’ top 10 players was between 10 and 27 minutes.
▪ Overall during his five-year stint as BYU head man, Pope had only four players who averaged 30 minutes of playing time a game or more (though one of those, guard Alex Barcello, did it three different seasons).
▪ For his five seasons (2019 through 2024) at Brigham Young University, Pope’s regular playing rotations were eight players (2019-20), 10 (2020-21), nine (2021-22), 10 (2022-23) and 10 (this past season).
Assuming Pope continues to utilize his team’s personnel in the same manner at Kentucky as he did at BYU, UK men’s basketball will be making a fairly stark departure from the common practices of the John Calipari era.
While there were two notable exceptions — the two-platoon system in 2014-15 and this past season’s 10-deep substitution pattern — Calipari at UK mostly preferred a tight playing rotation.
Where Pope had only four players average more than 30 minutes a game in his five seasons at BYU, Calipari had 13 players average 30 minutes or more at Kentucky during the same five years.
On Calipari’s first Final Four team at UK in 2010-11, the Cats had six players who appeared in all 38 games and all averaged between 28.5 minutes a game (Josh Harrellson) and 35.9 minutes a game (Brandon Knight).
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