Kentucky Basketball: John Calipari Has His Platoons All Wrong Right Now
I'm all in on John Calipari's platoon approach. It's a bold strategy, but once he ran it out onto the floor, any other approach would have seemed silly. When you looked at this team and all the talent it has from 1-10, this was really the only option.
However...
And that's a big however because the answer is not just "do a platoon" and leave it at that. How Calipari uses his platoons and the combinations he chooses to use are going to make all the difference in the world. Cal has his most experienced team yet, but the platoon itself has the ability to bring back the uncertainty of having a totally new team.
Kentucky and Calipari have a brand-new, shiny toy to play with this season. The temptation is going to be there to play around with it for a while before settling on the best solution as the season goes on. But like the infamous tweak last season, the answer would have been staring them in the face the whole time.
When the matchups for the Blue-White scrimmage were released, they made plenty of sense:
| BLUE | WHITE |
| Andrew Harrison | Tyler Ulis |
| Aaron Harrison | Devin Booker |
| Trey Lyles | Alex Poythress |
| Willie Cauley-Stein | Marcus Lee |
| Karl Towns | Dakari Johnson |
| Derek Willis | Dominique Hawkins |
Split up the freshmen to keep them intermingled with veteran players. Try to make the platoons as even as possible. And it seemed like a good fit aside from the Harrison-led team pulling away three quarters of the way through.
But then, that's when it happened.
With 11 minutes left and the score too lopsided to be interesting anymore, Calipari switched things up and went with a veteran platoon and a newcomer platoon.
| BLUE | WHITE |
| Andrew Harrison | Tyler Ulis |
| Aaron Harrison | Devin Booker |
| Alex Poythress | Trey Lyles |
| Willie Cauley-Stein | Marcus Lee |
| Dakari Johnson | Karl Towns |
| Dominique Hawkins | Derek Willis |
The Blue team was clearly better and more polished, which is exactly what you would expect from the veteran team. But the White team held its own and played with more energy. And that's when it struck me: Equal platoons do not mean better platoons.
There are very clear advantages to laying out the teams this way.
One team beats you down, the other team wears you down.
The Blue team is the more physical team. Aaron and Andrew Harrison are both capable of bodying up, taking fouls and getting into the lane. Alex Poythress is stronger than just about anyone in college basketball. Dakari Johnson is a beast down low. Willie Cauley-Stein can be the token leaper who is the defensive presence.
Then the White team will run the other team to death. Tyler Ulis is a water bug, and Trey Lyles, Karl Towns and Marcus Lee are extremely mobile big men. They can run up and down the floor and toss alley-oops to each other. They'll make mistakes, but that's OK because five minutes later, the more polished team comes back in and takes advantage of a worn-down defense.
It gives the freshmen more ownership.
You could see it as soon as they split up the teams this way. All the freshmen got more confident. They didn't have to cede the floor to the veterans. They were freed up to be themselves. They'll learn much more quickly this way.
Lee is basically a freshman for as much as he played last year, and he could really benefit from not having to share the floor with either of the big men who took his minutes last year. With this squad, he's let loose and able to play that Cauley-Stein role of blocking shots and catching oops.
It's a better fit for certain players.
Poythress is the kind of guy who is at his absolute best when he's not the best player on the floor. With the Blue team, it could be argued that he's the worst player in that starting five, which is ideal for him. He doesn't need to create and becomes free to do what he does best: create havoc on the boards and make well-timed cuts to the basket when attention is on the other players.
Derek Willis is a perfect fit to go with the White team. He's a sophomore, but is still very much a young kid who needs some confidence. Free of the more seasoned veterans, he becomes a veteran of that squad and actually fits in really well when he rotates in, especially because it's lacking a real swingman.
Just like how the platoon system seems like a no-brainer now, these specific platoons are going to seem like no-brainers down the line. Calipari needs to go against his natural instinct to keep the teams as even as possible and, in fact, make them as uneven as possible.
The season may depend on it.
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