Cameron Mills shares final Kentucky MBB summer practice report

Four hours of practice per week across eight weeks have come and gone, 32 summer practices for Mark Pope and the Kentucky Wildcats flying by ahead of the 2024-25 college basketball season. They got a quick break, but are now back and ready to return to action at the Joe Craft Center.

Big Blue Madness is just six weeks away, after all.

What do you need to know about the team before things get hectic with preseason festivities? Let Cameron Mills, who played at Kentucky from 1994-98 while racking up 365 total points and 81 made 3-pointers in four seasons, tell you.

The former Wildcat was in and out of practice all summer long and learned just about all there is to know about his alma mater, now coached by his teammate and fellow national champion in Pope. He released another edition of the UK HealthCare Practice Report, courtesy of the UK Sports Network, highlighted by three major takeaways:

• 32 Summer Practices
• Team Bonding
• Coaching Offense vs. Defense

“Cannot emphasize enough the importance of 32 practices that Mark Pope’s new team got this summer,” Mills said. “The importance of it is — you heard Pope talk about so many times — getting kids in here that have the bandwidth to understand that they had a brand new offense to learn and a brand new defense to learn. But it’s not just that. It’s actually learning each other and understanding and getting that sixth sense of where the other player is going to be if I’m driving down the right lane or the left lane. So everything they’ve done on the court, whether it’s those 32 practices or as they go forward the next few weeks now back on campus, is to learn each other, learn the offense, learn the defense and learn how to play together as a team.”

Then there is the off-court chemistry that translates to chemistry on the floor. We just saw them go to Hazard for a team retreat this weekend, building houses and hanging out at the lake. But they’ve also done the traditional team-bonding activities such as bowling and golf.

“Everything right now about learning how to be together and build a team, because we’ve got 13 or 14 new guys this year,” he added. “It’s different than what we’ve had in the past where we’ve got five new guys, maybe. We’ve got a whole brand new team that’s gotta learn how to gel and coach is trying to get them to gel as fast as possible.”

How about the specifics? Mills talks about Pope’s experience with Larry Bird when he coached him on the Indiana Pacers, the NBA legend designating one offensive expert and one defensive expert on his staff.

Pope is doing something similar while also adding a few of his own tricks, including piping in crowd noise.

“That’s what he’s building here, except he’s got two coaches on offense and two coaches on defense. That’s their specialty. They take turns trading in and out,” Mills said. “Whether we’re focusing on defense in the practice or offense, that coach or those coaches get in and they’re teaching because there is a lot of new stuff for these guys to learn defensively. One of the interesting things is, while they’re working on defensive drills, they’re piping in loud, in-your-face-on-the-road crowd noise. So more than anything, these guys are having to learn how to communicate, how to communicate verbally and non-verbally.”

And then there’s the shooting, what everyone wants to know about. We’ve heard about the 35 threes per game Pope wants his players taking, but how many of them will be makes?

Mills expects efficiency to go with that volume.

“The amazing thing about it is it’s not just how many threes I think we’re going to get up per game this year, but one through five, we’ve got guys — I can’t think of a single guy that can’t shoot at least 33 percent from the three-point line,” he said. “Now look, we’ll have fives and bigs that aren’t going to shoot as many threes, but of the guys that will consistently shoot threes, you’re talking a large percentage (of makes).

“We’re going to have a lot of threes shot in every single game. And I can’t really promise this, but it seems pretty obvious to me we’re going to make a lot of three-point shots.”

Take a look at Mills’ complete practice report:

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Can the season tip off now?