Kentucky Basketball point guard Jaland Lowe missed a majority of this past season with a shoulder injury. We’ve all known it was a big loss for the Cats this season, but just how crucial was his presence not being on the court?
It wasn’t just the fact that Kentucky was without a true veteran point guard. It turned out the 2025-26 roster was built with Lowe’s left-handed playstyle in mind, so losing him turned out to damage the offense more than anticipated.
”J Lo is a left-handed point guard, so we made a cautious decision last spring when we secured his services that we were going to change the orientation of everything that we did on the court to serve a left-handed point guard,” Pope said.
Okay, I’m not a basketball coach. But here’s what I will say: This is actually incredible attention to detail.
“One, it actually suits a right-handed big extremely well in a lot of ways,” Pope said. “And point guards and bigs work together a lot in a general pick-and-roll. If you have a point guard that comes off the ball screen to his left, you get to have a big man that’s rolling to his right. It’s way more effective than what you traditionally have, which is trying to serve a right-handed point guard, rolling to his right, and a left-handed big trying to roll and finish with his left.”
Again, this may just be lip service to a lot of fans. That’s probably because of how the season went. However, I find this quite interesting.
It’s not an excuse. This is reality. Mark Pope knows the game. He’s won a national championship, after all.
“So you get straight trying to finish a right-handed, yeah, a right-handed point guard, and then you have a right-handed big trying to finish with his left,” Pope continued. “You get both guys working their strong hand. Really, really important. And we changed the orientation of everything we did on the offense.”
Maybe they didn’t have to do all of this. But if you think about how many left-handed ball-handlers there are in college basketball, you might be surprised.
Perhaps Pope did know what he was doing.
“We got all the way to the Blue-White Scrimmage. We lose J Lo, but we said, hey, we’re going to keep it this way, because we’re going to get them back,” Pope said. “And we did get them back. And then it was just this, you know, by the time we got to, you know, through St. John’s to January, find like, you know, this is going to be really he finally decided to have surgery. ”
Now, I will say this: Hope is not a strategy. But if they truly thought they were getting him back, then why change something completely that close to the start of the season or during the season?
Again, I don’t see anything wrong with what Pope is saying. I actually find it really insightful. It also helps explain why a $22 million roster struggled so much to meet expectations, especially with Lowe and Jayden Quaintance missing most of the season.
This roster was built with Lowe strongly in mind. Maybe these Wildcats were lucky to be as good as they were without him.
