Top 3 Kentucky Point Guards of the Calipari Era
By Alex Weber
It’s no secret that Kentucky head coach John Calipari is an elite developer of point guards, but who are the best ones he coached in UK blue?
This is the first installment of a series of articles where I’m going to enter my very own hindsight matrix and look back at 10 incredible years of Kentucky Basketball with John Calipari at the helm, ranking every player at every position, starting, of course, with point guards. This is part of a project I’m calling the “Godfather Team” of Kentucky Basketball over the past 10 seasons. The Godfather is reviewed as the greatest movie of all time. How fitting. Kentucky is the greatest basketball program of all time. Two GOATs, and I’m combining them.
The thing about the Godfather which captivates me more than anything else is the cast. It might be the greatest cast of all time. If you were to time travel back to the 1970s and elect a perfect roster of actors for a brand new movie, I’d say everyone’s list would closely resemble The Godfather’s ensemble. Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duval, and John Cazale are the main five. Like a starting five, if you will. Look, this by no means is a list of the top five stars in 1972, but there are a few stars and some perfect complementary pieces. In basketball, you can’t just throw five of the greatest players of all-time out on the court and call it the best team ever. The egos would be too much to handle and the chemistry would be off. You need players capable of fitting perfectly together on a court for 40 minutes. Like the 70s produced with the Godfather, I’m combing a decade of greatness (in Kentucky Basketball) in hopes of finding the perfect lineup. You can play along.
To begin, I’m going to rank the point guards of the Calipari era, starting with the top three-point guards of the past decade. Since we have close to a million great point guards of the past ten years, I had to split them up. So here are the top three: