Kentucky practices have developed into the pursuit of perfection

During his first radio call-in show of the season on Monday night, Kentucky men’s basketball head coach Mark Pope stated that practice lasted three hours earlier in the day.

That’s a bit longer than usual for the Wildcats, but the basketball junkies on the roster don’t seem to mind. After all, it hasn’t been an ideal start to the season for Kentucky: four easy wins over bad teams, two ugly losses against good teams. Injuries haven’t helped the cause, but it’s not unfair to say this group has fallen short of expectations through the first stretch of the 2025-26 season.

“I just feel like we still have so much room to grow and get better,” Sophomore guard Trent Noah said Tuesday. “It didn’t feel like three hours, that’s for sure. It went by a whole lot quicker. We got to compete a little bit and just kinda have some juice in the gym.”

A new common theme has emerged in practice: perfection. That started with Monday’s three-hour session. Even if everyone completes a drill with 99 percent accuracy, the coaches will address that one percent and make them run it back until they reach 100. Minor details that might have gone unnoticed earlier are now being pinpointed and called out.

“We’re not letting anything slide in practice anymore,” Sophomore forward Andrija Jelavić said. “We’re doing everything perfect, every exercise we have it must be a perfect exercise or we do it again… No more little mistakes, no more little details that we maybe go over. Now we need to be perfect to go onto the next exercise, and if that takes three hours, four hours, it doesn’t matter. We gotta be perfect.”

Noah mentioned in his interview with local media that Pope is trying to “tweak” (the BBN’s favorite word) things in practice a bit. But above all else, the major focal points right now center around upping the team’s assist-to-turnover ratio. That’s always been a big deal for this team since the offseason, but there’s “an extra emphasis on it” right now.

Kentucky already ranks among the top in the country in assist-to-turnover ratio. The Wildcats’ mark of 1.83 (117 assists to 64 turnovers) is currently 25th nationally. But that figure is slightly inflated due to the competition. Against Nicholls, Valparaiso, Eastern Illinois, and Loyola (MD), Kentucky’s assist-to-turnover ratio is 2.2 (90 assists to 41 turnovers), which would rank second in the country. In losses to Louisville and Michigan State, that number dips to 1.17 (27 assists to 23 turnovers). It’s no coincidence that UK is 0-2 when recording fewer than 15 assists and 4-0 when going over 20.

It’s not just offensively where perfection is being required, though. Kentucky was expected to have a better defensive group compared to last season. They’ve looked the part against the non-P4 schools, but gave up 96 points to Louisville and 83 to Michigan State.

“After two hours of our regular practice, we had to make a perfect defensive possession two times,” Jelavić said. “It had to be 30 seconds perfect possession in every single detail. We were there for another hour until it was perfect. That’s what we’re gonna do every day from now on.”

“We had a perfect possession drill that lasted forever,” Noah added. “And in the moment it can be something so minor that has no impact on the possession at all, but it’s just our standard that we live up to and that we do.”

Kentucky has been anything but perfect to begin the season. Skeptics might argue that this move is coming in too late, or that the pursuit of perfection can lead to overthinking. But an optimist will tell you this is when it all begins to come together. With matchups against No. 16 North Carolina and No. 13 Gonzaga right around the corner, we’ll see the early returns soon enough.

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