Kentucky Wildcats Basketball Combine weekend big for recruits

Somehow John Calipari has done it again and it seems so effortless.  This weekend, most major basketball schools will be flying in recruits for official visits and trotting them out to college football games.  The Kentucky Wildcats will be doing that as well, but in addition will have the eyes of all the recruits in the nation on them nationally at the same time.  The weekend has arrived for the Kentucky NBA Combine and it will be televised.

"Representatives from all 30 NBA teams are expected to be in town for Calipari’s combine-like weekend, with special practices scheduled Friday and Saturday. Players will go through drills in front of NBA scouts. ESPNU cameras will be rolling, with live national coverage at 3 p.m. Friday that will include commentary from some of the network’s biggest basketball names. And UK recruits surely will be watching. “Any time you can say you have every NBA team in your gym on one day, it’s a special thing,” said Evan Daniels, a Scout.com recruiting analyst. “And it’s something that no other school can say right now. “I think part of this is Calipari being a marketing/PR genius. Every single one of these NBA guys were going to be at Kentucky at some point anyway. But he’s able to make a spectacle out of this and use it to his advantage and use it for recruiting purposes. So it’s smart on his part.”"

Caleb Swaningan, the #8 player in the 2015 class is scheduled to be in Lexington this week and will be able to take it all in up close and in person.

Mar 27, 2014; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Kentucky Wildcats head coach John Calipari during practice for the midwest regional of the 2014 NCAA Tournament at Lucas Oil Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Thomas J. Russo-USA TODAY Sports

At the center of all of this is going to be John Calipari. Kentucky fans have long embraced his PT Barnum style antics and have accepted him as one of our own … which is quite an accomplishment. The rest of the college basketball world outside the Bluegrass see him as everything that is wrong with college basketball. Which is it? Here is a pretty good take on Cal from a BBN outsider.

"Here’s what I’ve decided about Calipari: He is an extraordinarily complicated man, someone who transcends the easy hero/villain paradigm we set up to frame our sports’ fandom. He is a great rags-to-riches story, a blue-collar Pittsburgher’s son whose childhood bedroom was in the hallway between his parents’ and his sisters’ rooms, and who is now one of the richest coaches in American sports. He is a person whose ethics we question because the NCAA vacated his first two appearances in the Final Four, but he is also a person who attends Catholic mass every morning, his “30 minutes of silence and solace” that help him stay centered. He’s a guy we always assume is focused solely on himself, but he’s also a guy who spends hours bedside at local hospitals, and who, after the longtime cartoonist for a Kentucky newspaper was laid off, called the guy up and gave him a pep talk. He’s someone we assume is focused only on recruiting the best players and sending them packing to the NBA a year later, but he’s also someone who is trying to get the University of Kentucky to offer a financial management class and a sports law class for freshmen so that his one-and-done players can benefit. He is someone we’re naturally drawn to with strong emotions. He is, in a sense, modern America: We are polarized, loving or hating but rarely residing in that gray and level-headed area between. Most of all, though, I’ve come to think of the defining characteristic of John Calipari as this: More than being the best recruiter this sport has ever seen, Cal is someone who better than anyone accepts college basketball’s current realities for exactly what they are – and who unapologetically takes advantage of them. Think of him as a car salesman if you want. But he’s the best damn car salesman there is."

Mar 28, 2014; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Louisville Cardinals head coach Rick Pitino reacts in the first half in the semifinals of the midwest regional of the 2014 NCAA Mens Basketball Championship tournament against the Kentucky Wildcats at Lucas Oil Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

And of course with all the attention focusing on Calipari this weekend, Rick Pitino had to get some attention, although it came off as the “old man yelling at clouds” type of rant. Despite having the best recruiting classes in his career recently, Pitino went on a rant about the shoe companies and how Louisville, as an Adidas school, is shut out of top recruits. You can bet this was inspired by Antonio Blakeney, who committed to Louisville for 11 days, decomitted, and now has just Nike schools on his list.

Got to be the shoes, right? Mike DeCourcy says not really.

"It would seem as though Louisville has had plenty of success recruiting athletes with a variety of shoe-company affiliations. The strangest element of Pitino’s soliloquy was this sentence: “I’m saying in the last five years, things have changed.” If anything, players seem more open to programs wearing different apparel than what they’d worn as prospects – if only because many expect to be in college for a single season and want to assure they are in the best possible situation to launch professional careers. And, perhaps, to assure there’ll be multiple bidders in any future endorsement negotiations. Kansas, which wears adidas, got freshman big man Cliff Alexander from the Mac Irvin Fire and Andrew Wiggins from CIA Bounce, another EYBL participant. It was well established Andrew and Aaron Harrison were Under Armour players, but they chose Kentucky, a Nike program. “As long as you’re doing your homework,” Pitino said, “the shoe companies aren’t to blame.” So at least there was one cogent statement on the topic"