This UK basketball roster took a weird turn. ‘I’m very intrigued,’ says analytics expert.

A funny thing happened as Mark Pope started building his first Kentucky basketball roster.

When John Calipari left Lexington for Arkansas last month, he also left the cupboard bare for his successor. That man turned out to be Pope, who came to town with the monumental task of building a team completely from scratch.

The expectation upon his arrival was that Pope — known as a practitioner of innovative offense in his previous job as BYU’s head coach — would reshape UK’s program in that vision, creating a dynamic scoring attack predicated on an analytical approach to putting the ball in the basket.

That remains the expectation.

But as Pope’s roster additions via the transfer portal started to mount, it was impossible to overlook a certain theme to his accumulation of talent. Most of Kentucky’s new players — and four of the first five transfers to commit to the program — were known more for their defensive ability than their offensive prowess.

“This could look very different than what we’ve seen from previous Kentucky teams,” said basketball statistician Evan Miyakawa. “Mark Pope is known as an offensive guy, right? But it’s like, ‘I’m getting guys I need to be good defensively, and then I’ll make a system that works for them.’ And if you compare BYU to Kentucky — offensively, he arguably has the same or better offensive talent than he’s had. So it’s not like he’s taking a step back offensively.

“I’m very intrigued by that.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

According to EvanMiya.com — Miyakawa’s analytics website, which delves deeper into the numbers of the sport — BYU had the No. 17 offense in college basketball this past season, an impressive feat given the recruiting limitations of that program, compared to a place like Kentucky. (The Cougars were 52nd nationally in defensive efficiency.)

Meanwhile, in John Calipari’s final season at UK, the Wildcats rated No. 97 in the country in defensive efficiency, an area that was a calling card of Calipari’s earlier — more successful — teams but had fallen off considerably over the past five years.

With all 10 of Calipari’s underclassmen (and all but one of his incoming recruits) leaving the program this offseason, Pope was left to build his first Kentucky basketball roster from basically nothing.

He’s done so, somewhat surprisingly, with a defense-first foundation.

Transfer portal additions Andrew Carr (a 6-foot-10 forward), Koby Brea (a 6-6 guard) and Kerr Kriisa (a 6-3 guard) are offensive talents. Carr, a two-year starter at Wake Forest, is a versatile big man who can shoot from long range. Brea was the best deep-ball shooter in the portal, making 100 3-pointers at a 49.8% clip at Dayton this past season. Kriisa is also an elite shooter and knows how to make things go as the leader of an offense. All should thrive under Pope.

Players like these are what college basketball observers who have followed Pope’s career expected when he took the UK job.

But the other four players in Kentucky’s incoming transfer class — San Diego State guard Lamont Butler, Oklahoma guard Otega Oweh, Drexel forward Amari Williams and Oklahoma State center Brandon Garrison — are something different.

And that these were four of Pope’s first five additions (along with Carr, who is by no means a “bad” defender) offers a glimpse into how Kentucky’s new coach is approaching year one.

That’s what has people like Miyakawa intrigued.

Kentucky ranks as the No. 3 transfer class in the country on EvanMiya.com, and the Cats were fifth on that list even before the additions of Brea and Kriisa on Wednesday.

Miyakawa said some of his readers expressed surprise that other teams — Kansas, for instance — weren’t rated higher. Part of that, he said, is — and using the Jayhawks as an example — such teams had exciting offensive players, yes, but in some cases the defense was lacking.

“And that’s certainly not the case for the players that Kentucky has gotten.”

Kentucky’s new-look defense

The transfer portal closed for new entries at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, and — with roughly 2,000 players putting their names on that list — Kentucky’s additions have a place of distinction.

Those four defense-first transfers in UK’s class have a projected defensive Bayesian Performance Rating for the 2024-25 season that rates in the top 25 among transfers nationally. That’s basically saying that of the top 25 available defenders in the portal, four will play for the Cats next season. To put that into perspective, no other program has added more than one such player.

Bayesian Performance Rating (BPR for short) represents the ultimate measure of a player’s overall value to his team when he’s on the floor. BPR takes a player’s individual stats on a per-possession basis and adjusts for variables such as the quality of the players he’s playing against and the quality of his teammates at the time he’s in the game.

During the 2023-24 season, Miyakawa explained BPR while talking to the Herald-Leader about the meteoric rise of Reed Sheppard, who relatively early established himself as — by this measure — the most valuable freshman in college basketball. (Sheppard went on to win multiple national freshman of the year awards, a validation of the metric.)

“It kind of takes all of what we want plus-minus to mean, but it addresses a lot of the weaknesses,” Miyakawa explained then. “Because plus-minus doesn’t have any contextual information. It doesn’t tell you who you played against. It doesn’t tell you how good the other team was or who your teammates are. It also doesn’t have any information about your individual stats, which BPR does. So it really tries to address a lot of those concerns of plus-minus, while still taking the main point of it. … ‘Who’s the most valuable on the floor?’”

Bringing up Sheppard is relevant here, because Miyakawa dropped another interesting observation related to the former UK guard and the Wildcats’ defensive-minded incoming transfers.

“Of those four players that we’re talking about, only Reed Sheppard had a better defensive BPR this past season than what they’re projected to have next season,” he said.

More on that point: Miyakawa explained that any of those four players — Butler, Oweh, Williams and Garrison — would have qualified as top 15 defenders in the SEC this past season, using their projected defensive BPR numbers for next season. If they’d all been on Kentucky’s team with those numbers, every one of them would have been a top 20 defender in the league.

For further context, Sheppard was Kentucky’s only top-20 defender — among SEC players — last season. In fact, over the past five UK seasons — the ones where Calipari’s defense really dropped off — four of those Kentucky teams have had just one defender ranked in the top 20 in the SEC, and the Cats had just two top-20 defenders in the other season.

Miyakawa’s projections have that trend reversing in a major way during Pope’s first season.

It’s also entirely possible that the projections for these four players could be underestimating their impact on Kentucky’s team next season. All four were arguably or unquestionably the best defender on their respective teams last season. In some cases, they were often surrounded by notably inferior defensive players.

So, what happens when potentially great defenders get similarly minded teammates?

“This is more anecdotal than anything, but … if you have one really good defensive player, but four other bad defensive players — there’s only so much that player can do,” Miyakawa said. “But when you have a really strong three, four, five guys on the court defensively, that collectively allows you to be more aggressive, take more risks.

“So, yeah, I would expect that to have an even more accumulative effect there.”

Who are Kentucky’s new stoppers?

Butler — a three-year starter at San Diego State — is best known around college basketball for his buzzer-beating shot in last year’s Final Four to send the Aztecs to the national title game. But his calling card is defense. The 6-2 veteran of the sport is the reigning Mountain West defensive player of the year and made the league’s all-defensive team as a junior.

San Diego State has ranked no worse than 12th nationally in defensive efficiency over Butler’s three seasons as a starting guard, and he’s averaged at least 1.5 steals per game in all three of those years. Miyakawa’s defensive BPR projection for next season ranks him as the No. 4 player among all guards in the portal.

“The consistency there on the defensive end — for a San Diego State team that’s been very strong defensively — just means that he’s a very proven defender,” he said. “With that experience and coming from a team with as much of a defensive pedigree as San Diego State — that’s the main catalyst for him having a pretty good defensive projection there.”

Pope was effusive in his praise in his first public comments following Butler’s commitment.

“He might be the best perimeter defensive player in all of college basketball,” said the UK coach.

Williams — a 6-10, 265-pound big man from England with a 7-5 wingspan — is the three-time Coastal Athletic Association defensive player of the year, averaging 8.0 rebounds, 2.0 blocks and 0.9 steals in 23.7 minutes per game over those three seasons.

“That’s very good per-minute production. So that’s a really good sign,” Miyakawa said.

The statistician noted that Williams also had a much better defensive rating than anyone on his Drexel team, and his ability to move in space and switch onto smaller players made him one of the most coveted defenders in the portal.

“Amari is a gifted defensive player who can switch onto any position, 1 through 5 , which will add security to how everybody else feels on the court,” said Pope, who made Williams his first official visitor as Kentucky’s head coach.

Miyakawa added that Drexel played its best team defense, by a wide margin, while Williams was on the floor.

“The team was about six points per 100 possessions better when he was on the court, defensively, than when he was on the bench,” he said. “So when you account that his box stats were really impressive, the team’s defense was playing, by far, its best when he was on the floor — it’s incredibly conclusive that he’s a huge impact defensively for them. And the fact that he was doing that on a team that wasn’t quote-unquote very good — and he still had a really strong defensive BPR — it just means that if he’s playing on a better team in a better system, there’s a lot of room for optimism that he’s going to be a really, really good force defensively.”

Oweh — a 6-5 guard and former top 100 national recruit — averaged 1.5 steals in 24.8 minutes per game as a starter at Oklahoma last season. He played in the Big 12, so Pope and new UK associate head coach Alvin Brooks III — formerly an assistant at Baylor — know him well.

“He brings a special physicality and intensity to the game,” Pope said when Oweh signed. “Otega spent his entire season last year picking up the point guard full court in the Big 12. His tenacity on the court is contagious.”

If you don’t count ex-Seton Hall point guard Kadary Richmond — who Miyakawa’s system classifies as a shooting guard — Oweh has the best projected defensive BPR of any shooting guard that was available this offseason. “Defensively, he’s one of the strongest guards in the portal,” he said.

Garrison — a 6-10 center and a McDonald’s All-American a year ago — averaged 1.5 blocks and 0.8 steals in 22.8 minutes per game as a starter at Oklahoma State as a freshman last season.

Miyakawa said Garrison’s box stats — while playing for a losing Cowboys team — point to promising results in the future, when he’s surrounded by better defenders. His “box defensive” BPR — a measure of a player’s value based on his individual stats alone — ranked in the top 20 in the Big 12, the best defensive conference in the country.

Garrison achieved that as a freshman, which — along with his All-American recruiting profile — should mean more good news moving forward.

“When the model takes into consideration all of those things, it’s fairly confident that he’s going to be an even better player, especially on the defensive end, than he was last year,” Miyakawa said. “And he was already the best defensive player — on a per-possession basis — on his team.”

Butler and Williams will be fifth-year college players next season, but Oweh and Garrison still have multiple seasons of eligibility remaining. That also means more room to grow. Both players are already ranked among the top 25 transfers defensively (and top 10 underclassmen in the portal).

Is it fair to assume that their trajectory as defenders could be even higher if they stick around for multiple seasons at Kentucky?

“Yes, I would expect that to continue to improve,” Miyakawa said. “Part of that is simply you gain more experience, and the best players ahead of you leave once they graduate. So in terms of how a player — some of these underclassmen — would rank in two or three years, assuming they keep this up, they’re going to be some of the best defensive players in the country.”

Balanced UK basketball roster

Another interesting series of facts related to the defense Pope is building …

Last season, Reed Sheppard was the only Kentucky player to average more than 1.0 steals per game.

Last season, no BYU players averaged more than 1.0 steals per game.

This coming season, Kentucky’s roster — which is still not complete, don’t forget — will feature three players who have averaged 1.4 or more steals per game at least once in their college career: Butler, Oweh and Williams. Plus Carr, who averaged 1.0 steals per game as a junior at Wake Forest, and Garrison, who averaged 0.8 steals in 22.6 minutes per game as a freshman last season.

“When you stack up all these guys who are at or above one steal a game, that’s probably going to collectively put a ton of pressure on other teams. Which is pretty exciting,” Miyakawa said.

Going back to what has Miyakawa — and others who have been following this process closely — most intrigued is that Pope is obviously upgrading his defense in a big way from a BYU squad that was still serviceable on that side of the ball last season, but he hasn’t done it at the expense of offense.

Simply put, this UK team should defend the ball much better than BYU (or Kentucky) did last season. And, if you look at the puzzle pieces Pope has assembled, the Wildcats’ offense projects to be as good or better than last season’s BYU team, which finished second in the Big 12 and top 20 nationally in offensive efficiency, according to Miyakawa’s numbers, as well as the KenPom and Torvik ratings.

Brea was one of the country’s best 3-point shooters at Dayton last season, and — while he would fit anywhere — should be especially effective in Pope’s offense.

Kriisa is similarly suited for Pope’s approach and made 61 3-pointers at a 42.4% clip last season at West Virginia, after starting for two elite Arizona teams as a sophomore and junior. Miyakawa’s projections have Kriisa among the top 20 offensive players in the portal and the best of UK’s additions on that side of the ball.

Carr, a two-year starter at Wake Forest, is another highly skilled and seemingly perfect fit for Pope, a big who can play away from the basket and shoot (37.1% from deep last season).

Kentucky’s two incoming freshmen — Collin Chandler and Travis Perry — are guards known much more for their scoring ability than their defense.

Seemingly the most likely remaining addition to this UK roster is 6-7 guard Jaxson Robinson, who was BYU’s leading scorer last season — averaging 14.2 points per game as the Cougars’ sixth man — while hitting a total of 142 3-pointers at a 34.9% rate over the past two years.

Robinson is going through the NBA draft process, but he’s also entered the transfer portal, and — if he does indeed return to college — Kentucky will be widely considered the favorite.

And none of those four “defense-first” UK commitments are offensive liabilities.

Butler averaged 9.3 points per game last season and is known as a slasher. Oweh averaged 11.4 points per game and shot 37.7% from 3-point range as a sophomore, and Pope has praised his ability to get to the free-throw line. Williams is expected to thrive as a passing big in Pope’s system, and his offensive rebounding ability should lead to plenty of second chances. Garrison is also a skilled passer, excels in ball-screen situations and is particularly efficient at scoring near the rim.

Miyakawa noted that Kentucky’s more offensive-minded portal additions have “very specific” skill sets that should fit well with what Pope wants to do with the ball. With even more offense — bolstered by impressive defensive traits — added to that equation elsewhere across the roster, UK’s outlook is mighty interesting at this early stage in the offseason.

Count Miyakawa among those intrigued.

“That seems like a pretty good strategy for constructing a team that’s going to have offensive killers and then, defensively, just be really, really solid.”

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