Jayden Quaintance 'breaking every record known to humankind' with ACL rehab

It will probably be a while before Jayden Quaintance takes the floor for Kentucky, but the big man continues to recover from his ACL surgery at a remarkable rate. At Media Day, Mark Pope said the staff will continue to take a cautious approach with Quaintance’s timetable to return, but marveled at how quickly he is passing benchmarks in his recovery.

“The one thing I can tell you is he is, like, breaking every record known to humankind in terms of his rehab,” Pope said. “It’s unbelievable.”

When Quaintance arrived at UK in late May to rehab his knee, his healthy leg was 46-49% stronger than his injured one; five weeks ago, that number was down to just 3%. That’s remarkable progress, made even more so by the fact that Quaintance is 20% stronger, has grown two inches, and gained 40 lbs.

“That’s crazy,” Pope said of the numbers. “This dude is a big, strong, hulking, brilliant — humbling for the head coach — player who is going to be really fun to coach this year.”

At that rate, it’s tempting to think about Quaintance taking the floor sooner rather than later, but that’s a gamble Pope won’t take in the big man’s best interests.

“So time-wise he’s just going so fast, but we are going to proceed with extreme caution, because we’re going to do — as fast as he’s recovering, we’re still — there’s a balance that we’re trying to strike where he’s got an incredible, incredible future in this game, and we’re going to make sure he gets every opportunity to help this team be great and also have an opportunity to go on and do all the great things he’s going to do after Kentucky.”

Quaintance still dominating Pope in chess

All summer, we heard about the battles between Mark Pope and Jayden Quaintance on the chessboard. Today, Pope revealed that Quaintance is so much better than Pope at the game that they’ve had to implement a rule that at any given moment, Pope can elect to turn the board around and play Quaintance’s side in hopes of getting an advantage. Even that hasn’t helped much.

“He was just at the house. It just got so depressing. So he was at the house two nights ago, and he was beating me so bad in a game of chess that we invented a new rule where I get to turn the board one time. 

“So he was beating me so bad. I’m, like, ‘Freeze, I’m going to turn the board and you have to play my position and I play yours,’ and the best I could come out of it was a draw, barely.”

Let’s hope Quaintance is one step ahead of his foes on the court as well when the time comes.