Facing his toughest rebuild yet, can John Calipari keep Kentucky in title mix?

It’s now time for John Calipari to work his most extreme makeover yet.

With the multiple reports Monday that center Bam Adebayo is retaining an agent and will stay in the NBA draft, Kentucky has now lost its top seven scorers and eight of its top nine from the 2016-17 team. The Wildcats will return just 7.4 percent of their scoring from that team, with just one player who had even a marginally important role with the squad that made the Elite Eight before losing to North Carolina.

That player is forward Wenyen Gabriel, who averaged 4.6 points and 4.8 rebounds as a freshman. By season’s end the exceedingly raw Gabriel had all but played himself out of Calipari’s rotation: In four NCAA tournament games, the five-star recruit averaged 6.5 minutes and 0.3 points while missing all eight of his field-goal attempts.

There’s your veteran to build around.

The rest of the returning roster: Sacha Killeya-Jones, a 6-10 sophomore-to-be who arrived as a five-star recruit but never left the bench in Kentucky’s final 19 games of the season; Tai Wynyard, a 6-10 center who sat the final 14 games; and a couple walk-on-caliber guys who played even smaller roles.

Then there is redshirt Hamidou Diallo, a five-star guard who arrived in January but never played and then rather unexpectedly threw his name into the draft late in the process. Diallo will not hire an agent and thus could return to Lexington and see his first collegiate action.

That callow crew will be joined by the No. 1 recruiting class in the country, which has become a Calipari staple. What currently is a six-man class that includes five of the top 31 Rivals.com prospects still could get even bigger and better, if Kentucky lands Rivals’ No. 2 player, 7-footer Mohamed Bamba, and/or another currently uncommitted prospect.

So, yes, Calipari will have a glut of talent. But it will be the most inexperienced talent he’s ever put on the floor.

The 2015-16 Wildcats also returned none of the top seven scorers from the previous season, but that team still had 14 percent of its scoring back – about double what next year’s group will have. That team had first-round pick Tyler Ulis, fourth-year junior Alex Poythress, Marcus Lee, Derek Willis and Dominique Hawkins all as veterans – and it didn’t get past the first weekend of the NCAA tournament.

The 2010-11 Cats also had 14 percent of their scoring returning from the previous year, led by juniors Darius Miller and DeAndre Liggins. Buttressed by a stellar freshman class and the emergence of senior center Josh Harrellson, that team made the Final Four.

Calipari has done a lot with young players, but he’ll be fighting history next season. A team that looks like the 2017-18 Wildcats has never won a national title.

Complete remodeling jobs requiring freshmen to do everything hasn’t been the formula for winning it all, which remains the annual objective for UK fans. (Even if that ranks second to winning draft night, according to the head coach.)

The last 11 national champions returned at least one double-digit scorer from the previous year, and often more than one. Seventeen of the previous 18 champions had a returning double-digit scorer. The lone exception was Florida’s 2006 team, which did have its Nos. 4 through 9 scorers back from ’05.

And if anything, the recent trend has been even more weighted toward experience. The North Carolina team that just won the title had six of its top eight scorers back from the previous season. Villanova’s 2016 champions returned five of its top eight scorers from ’15. Freshmen impact players have been almost nonexistent the past two Final Fours.

Even the two freshmen-led teams that have won the title in the past six years were heavily supplemented by veteran input. Duke’s 2015 team, with Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow and Tyus Jones, would never have won it all without senior guard Quinn Cook and others. And Calipari’s own 2012 team, with freshman Anthony Davis as its centerpiece and two other freshmen starters, needed clutch contributions from senior Miller and double-digit scoring averages from sophomores Doron Lamb and Terrence Jones.

Given those facts, plus the state of Kentucky’s roster, it seems wise to rejigger all the ridiculous 2017-18 Top 25s that sprang up predictably within hours of the end of the 2016-17 season. Many of them had the Wildcats No. 1.

Truth be told, any Top 25s published before the final deadline to withdraw from the NBA draft are worthless. Until we know who is on the roster for next season, what’s the point?

With Kentucky, we at least know almost everyone who will not be on the ’17-18 roster. We know that the top seven scorers are gone, and eight of the top nine. We know that even John Calipari, the master of the roster makeover, has never given himself this thorough a rebuilding job.

Set the over/under for times Cal moans about coaching the youngest team in the country at a million. But this is his creation, his way of program building. Nobody is making him recruit and shape a roster in this fashion.

This is the way Calipari wants to do the job, and he’s being paid $8 million a year to do it. How well it works in 2017-18 will be intriguing to watch.

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