Mark Pope has faith in Kentucky's three-point shooting
LEXINGTON, Ky. – There’s a consistent theme when it comes to the best teams that Kentucky head coach Mark Pope has had throughout his coaching career: They shoot a lot of threes, and they shoot them well.
He’s been to the NCAA Tournament three times as a head coach — four if you include 2020, when his BYU was projected as a No. 5-seed. In 2020, BYU led the nation in three-point shooting at 41.9 percent. In 2021, the Cougars shot 36.7 percent from three. In 2024, BYU shot ‘only’ 34.8 percent from three, but more than half of their field goal attempts came from beyond the arc. This past season, his first at Kentucky, the Wildcats posted a 37.5 percent mark from deep. Even at Utah Valley, the two seasons Pope’s teams won more than 20 games and competed for a WAC championship, they shot better than 38 percent from three.
The other four seasons combined? The four down years?
Pope’s teams combined to shoot just over 33 percent from three.
It’s not just a coincidence.
Which leads me to one of the concerns that I have for this Kentucky Wildcats basketball roster. Do they have the shooting they need to be able to play the way that Mark Pope wants his teams to play? There are only two guys on Kentucky’s roster that shot more than 2.6 threes per game last season. One of them — Jaland Lowe — did so while shooting 26.6 percent from deep. Only two players on the roster shot better than 36 percnt from three last season. One of them — Mouhamed Dioubate — did so while taking a grand total of 26 threes in 37 games while playing for Nate Oats.
Does this team, who is ranked No. 7 in our College Basketball Preseason Top 25, have enough shooting?
“It gets me so excited that you say that,” Pope said when I asked this exact question during our trip to Kentucky’s practice on Tuesday, a practice in which he told his team that they are going to break the record for most threes made by a Kentucky team in a season that was set … last year.
“We track every shot, all the time, all summer long, everywhere. Where our guys were Week 3 of the summer, you would have been like, ‘woooof, I don’t know if they’ll break that record,'” Pop said. “In last week’s work on court, we had six guys above 70 percent from three. We were dancing around two, trying to get to a third [at the start of the season]. Now we have six and a seventh that’s been dancing around 69 percent, 68 percent for like three straight weeks.”
“We’re going to have seven guys over 70 percent, and that translates to games for us. It always has.”
Part of the reason that growth has happened is who Pope has targeted when recruiting. They target the human as much as they do the player, guys that care about winning first and foremost. Pope’s belief is that if put winning as the priority, you care enough to allow yourself to be coached and developed, even if it means starting from the bottom when it comes to retooling a shooting stroke.
“It’s a lot of work going into it,” freshman Jasper Johnson said. He’s one of the guys that came into the program with work to do, and just this past weekend, he made the leap to the 70 percent club.
“I know it will pay off,” he said. “It’s already been helping me in practice. Owning and staying in my shot is something that Coach Pope has been preaching to me about.”
“We’ve had really humble guys that are willing to take our basic but important shooting cues and actually incorporate them in what we do,” Pope added. “Jasper Johnson for the first time was a 70. I’ve always talked about him as the most dangerous scorer, just wait until this guy is consistent and putting up 75s every week. This guy is going to kill you. I’m so proud of him.”
So don’t expect the Kentucky Wildcats to slow down at all this season.
“We want to push the envelope,” Pope said, “and I think we have the guys to do it.”
Subscribe to The Field of 68 on YouTube
Subscribe to The Field of 68’s Daily Newsletter
