5 Kentucky players crack EvanMiya's top 100 preseason player ratings

oweh quaintance 2 — Kentucky's Otega Oweh and Jayden Quaintance watched from the sideline during a recent practice. (Chet White/UK Athletics) Kentucky Men’s Basketball. Photo by Chet White | UK Athletics

With Big Blue Madness just a few days away, how about we dive into some preseason player rankings?

Statistician Evan Miyakawa released his list of the “top preseason players in Bayesian Performance Rating”, a stat otherwise known as BPR, which “quantifies how effective a team or player is, using advanced box-score metrics, play-by-play data, and historical information.” It’s essentially a model used to predict performance in future games.

Miyakawa used his BPR model to rank every single Division I basketball player going into the 2025-26 season. He also did the same with team rankings, with Kentucky checking in at No. 9. The social media post below features the top 30 players from that list, which the BBN quickly noticed did not include a single Wildcat, not even the expected Preseason SEC Player of the Year, Otega Oweh.

And while that may be true, it should be noted that Mark Pope‘s second UK team has five players ranked among the top 100. Only one other school, the defending champion Florida Gators, has as many as the ‘Cats.

Here are the top 30 players in CBB in the preseason ratings at https://t.co/cegyfz96ax!

These projections take into account statistical output, impact on team performance, performance in previous seasons, and high school recruiting profile. pic.twitter.com/FLs5bYKwzU
— Evan Miyakawa (@EvanMiya) October 8, 2025

Below are the EvanMiya ratings for every Kentucky player going into this season, freshmen and international players included. Keep in mind that there are a total of 5,566 DI players on the full list.

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46 | Otega Oweh
58 | Mo Dioubate
70 | Brandon Garrison
82 | Jayden Quaintance
87 | Jaland Lowe
315 | Kam Williams
353 | Jasper Johnson
395 | Malachi Moreno
907 | Andrija Jelavić
1,011 | Denzel Aberdeen
1,013 | Trent Noah
1,282 | Braydon Hawthorne
1,648 | Reece Potter
1,872 | Zach Tow
1,979 | Walker Horn
2,122 | Collin Chandler

The big shock here is obviously sophomore Collin Chandler checking in last among all Wildcats, even below the two walk-ons. A lack of playing time as a true freshman last season until the very end of the schedule likely hurts him with these kinds of advanced stats — there isn’t much data on him to pull from, and the season-long data that is available doesn’t look good on paper. Chandler shot just 36.1 percent from the field and had more turnovers than assists.

Compare that to sophomore Trent Noah, who played similar minutes but is ranked much higher by EvanMiya, and we can assume that Noah’s higher field goal percentage (45.1 percent) and fewer turnovers (nine) — among other factors — helped him out in that area. Chandler will almost certainly outplay this position early into the upcoming season, though. We all saw him perform well once March hit. But that ranking of 2,122 sure does feel oddly low.

The good news? Preseason rankings are just that — predictions of the future. Oweh, Chandler, and the rest of the Kentucky Wildcats can begin to prove the numbers wrong in a few weeks.

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