John Calipari media day transcript
By Jason Marcum
Q. You’ve been quite open about 40 0 as a goal or a target, and most coaches say the day to day process is what brings results. How do you
COACH CALIPARI: What I’ve said let me, again I feel like Jay Carney up here. Let me again tell you what I’ve said for about eight years.
I’ve said, before I retire, I would love to coach a team that goes 40 0. Now, as a Democrat, you can say what I said, as a Republican, you can say what I said, but I’ll say it again. I’ve said it for eight to ten years. Before I retire, I would like to coach a team that goes 40 0. Will that happen? I don’t know.
Every game we play, we play to win. We’re not playing any game not to win. The reason I like the mentality of every game matters is you don’t want to get upset by people that you shouldn’t be beat by. That game matters as much as a North Carolina or MichiganState or whoever else. Those games matter too.
We don’t talk about it as a team. I mean, I don’t it’s not like, oh, we’re going 40 0. We don’t. The way we do this is a process.
Now, being that’s something I would like, who knows whether the team would like that. Now, that being in mind, I’ve had three teams that already did it. We started talking three teams almost did it, and by not doing it, we won the most games in the history of the NCAA. No team has won more games, two of my teams.
So you may not go 40 0, but you’re doing special things.
Q. Should this team be the No. 1 team in the country?
COACH CALIPARI: I haven’t seen anyone else. So I don’t know.
Q. But don’t you
COACH CALIPARI: Really, I don’t know anyone else. So I can’t really tell you.
Q. You’ve coached No. 1 teams before, though.
COACH CALIPARI: But they were veteran teams. You’re talking about an inexperienced team. We’ll be the most inexperienced team in the country, but we’re really talented. We’ve got great size and speed and skill.
Will we be a great defensive team and rebounding team, and will we share the ball? If we do that, we have a chance to be one of the best teams in the country.
Are we right now? I have no idea because I don’t know where anybody else is.
Q. Independent of experience, is this the most talented team you’ve had?
COACH CALIPARI: Boy, that first team I had here was really talented. That first team was like, whew. 2012 it’s funny, we talk about the 2011. How did we ever get to the Final Four?
I like to say it’s my coaching and my system and my style of play and all that, but Brandon Knight’s in the league. Terrence Jones is in the league. Doron Lamb is in the league. Josh Harrellson is in the league. Darius Miller is in the league. DeAndre Liggins is a league player. We had good players that year. They just weren’t as good as the year before.
I’d like this to play out a little bit and look back. I will tell you, this team is deeper than that team. We have a couple more that we didn’t have, but you just had two guys sign max deals in the NBA. So, you know.
Q. If you can remember back to this, compared to how you felt about that 2012 team at this stage, when you look at them, when you watched them practice through however many number, how does that compare when you look at these guys and see what they can do early?
COACH CALIPARI: It’s a totally different backdrop now. We just lost in the first round of the NIT. So I’m saying that to this group. That group’s coming off a Final Four, and if we didn’t win a National title, it was a total failure to try to build that up so that we would fail.
So I like you won’t believe this. I like my team. And anybody that’s watched this knows we have good kids that are listening, that are sharing. We had the women’s clinic, 660 women come out, and as we did go up and down, I saw some showtime stuff.
Now, is that what’s going to happen when there are people in the seats? I don’t know. Hope not, but I saw a little bit of, stop, why did you do that? Where did that come from? Well, there’s people here. I’m going to show them some stuff.
So there’s a lot you know, I don’t think it’s going to happen, but we could start five freshmen. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but it may because I basically, I don’t make that choice. It could happen.