Led by Kam Williams, Kentucky's 3-point shooting progressively improved during the summer

At least on paper, the 2025-26 Kentucky men’s basketball team doesn’t stack up to the 2024-25 edition in terms of three-point shooting. Mark Pope‘s debut Wildcats team rained down 341 three-pointers, a school record by just one bucket, narrowly beating out Rick Pitino’s 1992-93 group. Six different players made more than 20 threes on the season, led by Koby Brea‘s 93.

After a Sweet 16 finish, Pope elected to adjust his roster-building tactics in the offseason. Kentucky lacked size and athleticism last season, so he went after bigger and faster players. If there are any potential “flaws” to point to with this upcoming Kentucky team, it would be the lack of a Brea or Jaxson Robinson type — a shooter-first player who soaks up a ton of minutes. The ‘Cats will have plenty of talented marksmen, but most of them will likely come off the bench.

With all that in mind, we could expect Kentucky to come up short of knocking down another 341 three-pointers in a single season. But Pope would tell us not to get too far ahead of ourselves. During his sitdown with the Field of 68 crew on Tuesday in the Joe Craft Center, Pope talked about how he’s been impressed with how much his team has improved at shooting the ball throughout the course of the summer.

“We track every shot, all the time, everywhere in practice. All summer long,” Pope said. “If you looked at where your guys were week three of the summer, you might be like ‘woof, I’m not sure we’re gonna break that record.’ But today, as of today, in last week’s work on court, we had six guys above 70 percent (from three). We were dancing around with two, trying to get to a third earlier in the summer. Now, we have six, and we have a seventh that’s been dancing at 69 percent, 68 percent for three straight weeks. We’re going to have seven guys over 70 percent.

“That translates to games, it always has for us. It translates to games.”

We don’t know the exact list of the six or seven guys that shot 70-plus percent from deep last week, but we do know of a couple. Pope said Croatian stretch forward Andrija Jelavić shot 77 percent on triples last week. Freshman Jasper Johnson is the latest member of the club, finally getting over that threshold for the first time just a few days ago.

“This past weekend, I knew I had to get to 70 percent on my workouts,” Johnson told Field of 68. “I was around 68, 69 percent for a long time, but I just couldn’t leave until I got to 70.”

“I’ve always talked about him as the most dangerous scorer. Wait until this guy is consistent,” Pope added of Johnson. “Wait till he’s putting up 75s every week, then it’s a different story. Then it’s like this guy is gonna kill you.”

Other Wildcats, such as Trent Noah, Collin Chandler, and Denzel Aberdeen (or maybe even Jaland Lowe?), are guys we can guess as likely members of the 70 percent club. But Tulane transfer Kam Williams is the most likely choice if Chandler’s story from a practice earlier this week is any indication.

“I wish that BBN could have been at practice yesterday,” Chandler said on the Field of 68. “I don’t know if people have talked about it, but it was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. We were just going up and down, probably 10 possessions in a row, we found Kam for a three. Contested or not, 10 in a row. Probably had 30 points straight. Hopefully, the tape will be out soon.”

The BBN would agree, Mr. Chandler. Release the practice film!

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