Kentucky Basketball: Calipari Era top four shooting guards

10 seasons of brilliance on the basketball court under John Calipari produced some elite shooting guards for Kentucky Basketball. But who are the top five?

This is the second installment of a series of articles called the “The Godfather Lineup,” 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 in an attempt to assemble the greatest possible roster of Calipari-era players. 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 select 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. Chemistry matters. Fitting multiple different players’ games together matters. Starting Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar together would be disastrous. 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 by voting on the poll at the end.

We addressed point guards the other day and now it’s time to relive the best shooting guards of the John Calipari era at Kentucky. I settled on a tier of 4 that I decided were just better than the rest. Here they are, in order. Remember, these rankings are based solely on their time with the Kentucky Basketball program.