Calipari wants to incorporate tablet technology in timeouts

In recent years, the NFL and NBA have experimented with using tablets on the sidelines to show players real-time game footage and plays. Always looking for what’s next in the sport, John Calipari said he wants to bring that technology to Kentucky Basketball.

“We’re talking about doing what the NBA has done and the NFL. Remember when the NFL used to have pieces of paper they’d show their players? They’d come down and they’d be on the sideline and the offensive coordinator would come in with a sheet of paper and show them? Now they’re doing it with iPads. So now they come down and there’s video that they show them. The NBA is going to that. We’re right now talking, why aren’t we going to that?”

The NBA started allowing tablet technology on the sidelines in 2016, and LeBron James was the first major star to embrace it.

“Just seeing how defenses are playing me, playing us,” he explained in December 2016. “Kind of watching and paying attention to the minutes I was in. We should be trying to find ways to continue to build our game. Bring technology into it. If guys want the ability to watch film during the game while they’re out, they should do it.”

Calipari hopes the technology will help him better demonstrate what he wants from his players. Some guys get that from a white board; others don’t.

“I have guys like — Malik Monk, I could talk to. I never had to draw [a play]. He’d say, ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘You’re going to come down off, they’re going to pin you down, you’re going to loop up.’ ‘Got it. Alright, you want me to loop up. Alright.’ And he’d run and do it. Other guys, they have no shot if I don’t draw it. None. They have no idea what I’m talking about. They can’t. Other guys, I draw it, they leave the huddle, they come back and say, ‘This is what you want me to do?’ I hope they do that because if they don’t do that, they’re not going to do what I’m asking them to do. Other guys need to see it on video. Shai needed video. He needed to see it. So, my thing is, why not have video? You can still use a board. You can do the video. But I would say they’re a smart group. And I think they have a pretty good feel for what we’re trying to do.”

Makes sense to me.

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