It’s a different time in the Kentucky Basketball practice facilities. New coach equals new philosophy and that means the summer is used for integrating Coach Mark Pope’s style with his very first squad at the University of Kentucky.
Cameron Mills has attended a couple of practices, including Friday’s session, and gave us a breakdown of what he’s seen so far, which includes full-court practices ramping up this week.
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“They’re not quite doing a lot of full-court yet. According to Coach Pope, that’s coming next week,” said Mills on Friday. But they’re doing a lot of stuff, because the most important thing of everything, as you can imagine…we’re used to here at Kentucky having to integrate a new team every year. This is more so than we’ve ever done before with 12 new guys.
“What they’re working on right now is making sure all of their throughput is coming from the same hard drive. These guys are on the same note, on the same team. They are all doing things together.”
The emphasis for the first couple of practices seems to be getting the team on the right page and the right system. Making sure they’re one cohesive unit from the start of the season, and not relying on them to (hopefully) mesh together by the months of February and March.
Mills also goes on to say that there was a defensive breakdown between two players in practice that led to an easy offensive basketball; Pope blew his whistle, asked them what they did wrong (answer: not communicate), and asked them how they could fix it.
According to Mills, Pope then made them get together and talk it out themselves on how to fix it.
