John Calipari’s first season at Kentucky ended in disappointing fashion, a gut-wrenching Elite Eight loss to West Virginia in 2010 that made a 35-win season feel like a failure.
A few months later, however, a record five members of that team would hear their names called in the first round on NBA Draft night — and Kentucky and Calipari haven’t looked back since, winning the 2012 national championship, reaching three Final Fours and ascending to God-like status on the recruiting trail.
“The paradigm changed,” Calipari said this week on a conference call, referring to the group he feels spawned his current perch atop the recruiting landscape.
The NBA numbers are staggering. Seventeen Kentucky players drafted in four years, 12 of them freshmen. Thirteen first-round picks, 11 freshmen.
That number is certain to jump by June, when rugged freshman forward Julius Randle is expected to be a top-five pick, and could be joined in the first round by wing James Young and guards Aaron and Andrew Harrison.
“He’s the one-and-done king,” Scout.com recruiting analyst Evan Daniels said.
Calipari brought a No. 1 recruiting class to Lexington his first year after taking over the floundering program, and has recruited at that elite level since, putting together four straight No. 1 recruiting classes on top of that one, including this latest group of six McDonald’s All-Americans that has turned an underwhelming regular season into a Final Four run.
Next year’s four-man class of McDonald’s All-Americans is subpar by Calipari standards — ranked second in the nation by all the scouting services.
The obvious question is: How does he do it? The NBA is the obvious reason. Winning helps, of course, but the lure of getting to the league is what really attracts top recruits, Daniels believes. And nobody does it better than Calipari.
“He has the ultimate recruiting pitch,” the recruiting analyst said. “He can get guys to the NBA as quick as possible. Sure, they love college, but at the end of the day the goal is to get to the NBA, and they want to get there as quickly as possible.”
Players and parents insist that though the NBA is part of the equation, Calipari himself plays a major role. There are some who look at his flashy suits and fast-talking personality, and see a slick salesman. Aaron Harrison Sr., the father of the this season’s freshman backcourt stars, saw someone different, a bluntly honest coach unafraid to scare off a top prospect. Calipari took a risk in recruiting his kids. He didn’t tell them what they necessarily wanted to hear.
“What he said that was different from everybody else. ‘You won’t get 20 shots here, you won’t score 40 points in a game, you’ll have to work harder on defense than you ever have, and it’s not going to be easy, but Kentucky is the best place in the world to play basketball,’” Harrison Sr. said. “It was more of a challenge than a sell.”
Karl Towns, a 6-foot-11 top-10 prospect from New Jersey and one of the four incoming Kentucky freshmen, similarly was impressed by Calipari’s honest and critical opinion of his game — not the rosy outlooks he’s heard from so many other coaches and reporters.
“You’re nowhere close to where you should be if you want to do this as a career,” Calipari told him.
Towns loved it.
“It sounds blunt, but it was music to my ears,” Towns said. “It was someone not saying how great I am. That stuck with me.”
One of Calipari’s favorite lines, which he recites often, is “Kentucky isn’t for everyone.” He makes it clear, Harrison Sr. said, there will be competition for everything. Individual stars are for other schools. The pressure never stops, because he is a lightning-rod for criticism, and his players are extensions of him, so they are under the microscope, too.
“Every game is the Super Bowl,” Calipari said.
Though Towns and his father mentioned Kentucky having Towns’ preferred major, Kinesiology, and the family atmosphere the school offered, Karl Towns Sr. admitted the quick path to the NBA, “was a major factor. [Calipari] is somebody who will make you better for the next level.”
It’s not likely to end, either. The last championship team didn’t start five freshmen, as this one does. Kentucky, in fact, may be even tougher to beat on the recruiting trail after this stunning run, proof Calipari can mold talent, not just accumulate it. And then there will be June’s NBA Draft — which has become an infomercial for the Kentucky basketball program.
“They’ve got it as good as it gets,” Daniels, the recruiting expert, said. “It’s going to continue.”