John Calipari no fan of graduate transfers
MEMPHIS, Tenn. – With a mass exodus expected from Kentucky’s roster following the season, UK coach John Calipari and his staff are already well underway in assembling the next group of Wildcats.
Just don’t expect a graduate transfer to be the answer to any of the remaining available spots.
“Playing right away (as a graduate transfer), I don't think it's good for the kids,” Calipari said Saturday. “Many of them leave the school, don't even tell the coach. They text him and say, ‘I'm going.’ What? How about teaching them to be a man. If you want to sit down with the coach and say, ‘I'm thinking about doing this, what do you think?’ Well, let's talk through this.
“You have coaches now that are holding kids back academically so they can't graduate. Is that what we want? I mean, it's real simple: It's awful for mid-major coaches, for programs, and I don't think it's good for the kids. I really don't.”
Projected first-round picks De’Aaron Fox, Malik Monk and Bam Adebayo are considered near-locks to leave UK after their freshman seasons. Sophomore guard Isaiah Briscoe is also widely projected to leave school despite not being included in most mock drafts. Seniors Dominique Hawkins, Derek Willis and Mychal Mulder will have exhausted their eligibility whenever UK season ends.
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Rules adopted by the NCAA last season allow underclassmen to declare for the draft, participate in the NBA Combine and workout for teams without hiring an agent then return to school if they do not receive the feedback they want. Many Wildcats, including freshmen Wenyen Gabriel and Hamidou Diallo, who has yet to play as a Wildcat, seem likely to take advantage of that rule and could ultimately elect not to return to UK next season if they impress in workouts. Forward Isaac Humphries has acknowledged he will weigh his options after the season after playing a smaller-than-expected role as a sophomore.
Calipari already holds commitments from 2017 five-star recruits Quade Green, P.J. Washington, Nick Richards and Jarred Vanderbilt and four-star recruit Shai Alexander. Diallo, a five-star guard, was originally part of the 2017 class but enrolled at UK for the spring semester and is redshirting while practicing with the team.
Green is considered the best shooter of that group but will likely play with the ball in his hands as the Wildcats’ primary point guard. With the 2017-18 roster needing another guard that can shoot, many fans had pointed to a graduate transfer as the easiest path to filling that hole.
Calipari took former Wildcat Julius Mays as a graduate transfer from Wright State for the 2012-13 season but has not added one since and has apparently soured on the rule in recent years.
After Drexel fired former Calipari assistant Bruiser Flint in 2016, in a voice mail left for a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Calipari blamed the departure of guard Damion Lee from Drexel to Louisville as a graduate transfer for Flint’s struggles in his final season.
“What happened was, the NCAA has a rule that a kid can leave a program like Drexel after being coached and molded for three years and go to another school without having to sit out,” Calipari said at the time. “If Lee is there, they’re in the NCAA Tournament. We’re not even talking in these terms, but that happened.”
Asked Friday how his thinking on the issue had changed since adding Mays to his roster in 2013, Calipari doubled down on his defense of mid-major coaches like Flint.
“(Mays) really wanted to come to Kentucky,” Calipari said. “And I’m happy that we took him because he is one of the greatest kids I’ve ever coached, and he gave us a veteran guard. But at the end of the day, anyone that has a board with all the graduate transfers on it – like, ‘Who can we get from here?’ – think about it, those are players who are playing for a mid-major program that has invested in them and they have a year to go, and it’s that coach and that program’s time."
Instead of letting graduate transfers play immediately at another program, Calipari advocated for making them sit out a season like all other Division I transfers.
“If they had to sit out and they wanted to go to another program, I’d say that’s fine,” Calipari said. “But to play right away and have all of us trying to figure out who it is…I don’t feel good about that.”
So is the door shut for Kentucky adding a graduate transfer next season?
“The Julius (Mays) thing, at the time it was just starting,” Calipari said. “I don’t regret doing it, but obviously we haven’t done it since.”
Email Jon Hale at jahale@courier-journal.com. Follow him on Twitter @JonHale_CJ.
