Cats have more ball-handling and shot creation in Pope's second year

Mark Pope had a totally blank slate to work with in building last year’s roster. That came with advantages and disadvantages.

There are all kinds of contingencies Pope and his staff had to plan for, and both scholarship limits and who was available in the portal impacted the thinking.

He couldn’t have known the point guard depth would be as strained as it did become at times when Lamont Butler dealt with injury and missed games. That meant that sometimes Kentucky had a less than ideal point guard situation.

Collin Chandler stepped up into more of a ball-handling role last year at times. It also led to Travis Perry getting a lot more minutes than he might have earned in a different scenario.

Going into his second year at Kentucky, Pope is confident that the Wildcats have all the pieces for a very good backcourt. This week he said one of the differences with this year’s team is the number of options he has to work with at the point. If there’s an injury, it shouldn’t create an unsolvable crisis.

“I have a really talented backcourt,” Pope told reporters this week. “I have so many options. Otega’s played some minutes at the one. Collin Chandler’s played a lot of minutes at the one. Jasper Johnson’s completely capable of playing the one and I think DA (Denzel Aberdeen) is very comfortable playing the one. So we’re in a little bit of a different scenario than we felt like we were in last year because we feel like we have so many capable options.”

Pope’s approach to offense also expands the number of ways Kentucky can attack a defense, with more of the action running through bigs, as we saw with Amari Williams and at times Brandon Garrison last year.

But Pope sees a lot of options across the board.

“I also think that the two and the three were built a little bit different where we are probably going to have more ‘get where you want to go’ ball-handling on the floor besides just the point guard,” he said. “I think our two guard for the most part in the game and a lot of the times our three is going to be really aggressive off the bounce, to be able to make plays off the bounce. I think we’ll live in that space a lot this year.”

Pope’s deeper 2025-26 backcourt should also help Kentucky avoid a situation where the defense at the point guard position will not be as strained over the course of the season when players miss time.