Kentucky plans to spread out minutes in hopes of making deep SEC Tournament run

Over the last several weeks, Mark Pope has emphasized the need to battle player fatigue. Regardless of where you fall on that line of thinking, Kentucky isn’t going to be able to play its top guys every second of every game this week, especially if the Wildcats want to make a deep run in Nashville.

To make it to Sunday’s championship round at the SEC Tournament, UK will need to win five games in five days, beginning with Wednesday’s tournament opener against 16-seeded LSU. Head coach Mark Pope doesn’t want to burn his guys out in game one while also balancing the need to play them enough to still survive and advance — not an easy line to toe.

“If fatigue wasn’t a factor, then everyone would play five players for 200 minutes, right?” Pope said Tuesday. “You’d play everybody 40 minutes. It just doesn’t work that way. Everybody has a different tolerance for minutes. As you study guys, you see where their production starts to go down.”

Pope will still lean heavily on his trio of starting guards, much like he has for months. In particular, Otega Oweh, Denzel Aberdeen, and Collin Chandler have been racking up big-minute games for a while now. Oweh hasn’t played under 34 minutes in a game since late January, Aberdeen has been over 30 minutes in every game since early February, and Chandler has four straight games with at least 31 minutes.

Will those numbers be sustainable while still matching the expected production if Kentucky wants to win more than a couple of games this week? In an ideal world, the answer is obviously yes. But Pope wants to make sure that happens by continuing to utilize his team’s depth. UK is mostly using an eight-, sometimes nine-man rotation right now.

“We’d like to do the very best that we can to spread the minutes out the most we possibly can and be as competitive as we can,” Pope added.

Meanwhile, LSU might not have to worry about player fatigue as much as Kentucky. The Tigers are the lowest-seeded team in the tournament with no chance of making it to the Big Dance (other than by winning the SEC Tournament). Head coach Matt McMahon, who is on the hot seat, can load his best players up with as many minutes as he wants. It was just a few days ago that LSU played a 55-minute game in a triple overtime loss to Texas A&M.

“We hope to play multiple days, but we approach every tournament game as a one-game season,” McMahon said Tuesday. “We’re gonna roll with the guys we got. And they’re locked in, ready to go. I think Jalen Reece, as I mentioned he played 51 minutes Saturday. Marquel Sutton played 50, Max Mackinnon played 47, so we were kind enough to give them Sunday off and expect them to be refreshed and ready to go tomorrow.”

Kentucky can fall to LSU on Wednesday and still make the NCAA Tournament, but that’s not the goal in Nashville. LSU is playing with nothing to lose, while the ‘Cats need momentum in the worst way. A blowout win for UK would help with both team morale and keeping player minutes low, like Pope is hoping for.