Projected Kentucky basketball starting lineup after Mark Pope lands Andrew Carr

Mark Pope was hired quickly by Kentucky after John Calipari left for Arkansas, but before Pope could lock things down in Lexington, last year’s team hit the transfer portal. With Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham off to the NBA, Antonio Reeves and Tre Mitchell out of eligibility, and the rest of the roster, outgoing transfers, Pope had to rebuild the team from scratch. 

On Sunday, Pope signed his fourth transfer, Andrew Carr from Wake Forest. The stretch forward will give Kentucky some much-needed shooting and finally, the roster is starting to take shape. 

Kentucky has six players signed as of Monday, April 29, Travis Perry, Collin Chandler, their two incoming freshmen, along with Lamont Butler, Otega Oweh, Amari Williams, and Carr. So now, it’s time to project what the starting lineup could look like and how the pieces are starting to fit together. 

At BYU, Pope only had access to a certain type of athlete. That’s probably the best way to put it, and that limitation mostly hurt his team on the defensive end of the floor. To counteract that deficiency, Pope’s teams shot a lot of threes, last year the most in the country. 

In the NCAA Tournament against Duquesne, those three-pointers didn’t go down and BYU bowed out early as a No. 6 seed. Now that Pope is at Kentucky, it’s clear he’s willing to play a different brand of basketball, and bringing in Lamont Butler, the Mountain West Defensive Player of the Year, as his point guard exemplifies that shift in philosophy. 

Butler is such a nasty on-ball defender that he was named the best defensive player in that conference despite only averaging 1.5 steals and 0.2 blocks. He’ll be excellent at the point of attack, but last season, only shot 30.2% from three for San Diego State, on 2.9 attempts per game.