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A trio of Kentucky Wildcats named to All-NBA teams

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A trio of Kentucky Wildcats named to All-NBA teams


NEW YORK – After leading the nation with total players on NBA opening-day rosters, players appearing in the 2023 NBA Playoffs and the most NBA All-Stars of any collegiate program in the country for the 2022-23 season, it should be of no surprise that three former Kentucky men’s basketball players headlined the All-NBA Teams released on Wednesday. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was a first-team honoree, while De’Aaron Fox and Julius Randle were third-team picks.

Since 2015, Kentucky has had eight players earn 14 All-NBA honors. The number of individual players and the number of selections lead all other programs during that time frame. Gilgeous-Alexander and Fox earned the first honors of their careers, while Randle was selected for the second time in his career. All three players were also NBA All-Stars this season.

Gilgeous-Alexander finished the regular season as the league’s fourth leading scorer, averaging a career-high 31.4 points per game. Gilgeous-Alexander also contributed 5.5 assists and 4.8 rebounds per game for the youthful Oklahoma City Thunder. He tallied 44 games with 30 or more points this season and led the league in that category. He led the Thunder to the play-in tournament and won a game over the Pelicans. Minnesota outlasted the Thunder to earn the No. 8 overall seed, despite Gilgeous-Alexander averaging 27.0 points, 6.0 rebounds and 3.0 assists in two postseason games.

Gilgeous-Alexander averaged 14.4 points per game and 5.1 assists for the Wildcats during the 2017-18 season as he helped the Wildcats to a Southeastern Conference Tournament crown and was MVP. Additionally, he was an All-SEC Second Team and All-SEC Freshman Team honoree. In postseason action, Gilgeous-Alexander averaged 20.7 points, 6.3 assists, 5.7 rebounds and 2.0 steals per game in the SEC and NCAA Tournaments combined. He was then drafted 11th overall by the Hornets before his draft rights were traded to the Clippers.

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Fox started all 73 regular-season games in which he appeared for the Sacramento Kings who advanced to the playoffs for the first time since 2006. He averaged 25.0 points, 6.1 assists, 4.2 rebounds and 1.1 steals per game in his sixth NBA season. Fox was tabbed to the 2023 NBA All-Star Game roster, the first selection of his career and was voted as the league’s inaugural winner of the Clutch Player of the Year honor. The Houston native led all NBA players in clutch scoring with 180 points and shot 54.8% in clutch moments during the regular season. The Kings were 21-13 in the clutch with Fox leading the charge. He finished at the rim with a 78.0% field-goal clip, the highest mark of any guard in the league.

Fox was a part of the Wildcats for a march to the Elite Eight and a 2017 SEC Tournament title. He was an All-SEC First Team selection and was the SEC Tournament MVP. Fox scored a UK freshman-record 39 points in a Sweet 16 matchup against UCLA and was one of just three players in program history to record a triple-double. Fox averaged 16.7 points and 4.6 assists per game for the Wildcats before being selected fifth overall by the Kings in 2017.

Randle has the New York Knicks in the Eastern Conference Semifinals for the first time since 2013. During the regular-season he averaged a career-high 25.1 points per game, while also contributing 10.0 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game. He produced 40 double-doubles in 77 total games. Randle had four 40-plus point efforts, including producing the first 40-point, 15-rebound game for the Knicks since Patrick Ewing in 1996. Despite fighting an ankle injury for much of the playoffs, Randle is logging 15.9 points and 8.4 rebounds per game.

One of just three players under John Calipari to average a double-double, Randle was the leader of the UK squad that made its memorable NCAA Tournament run to the championship game in 2014. He averaged 15.0 points and 10.4 rebounds per game, while setting UK single-season freshman records in rebounds (417), double-doubles (24) and made free throws (204). He was a Final Four All-Tournament Team honoree, a Midwest Region All-Tournament Team selection, a third-team All-American, an All-SEC First Team pick and the SEC Freshman of the Year. Randle was drafted seventh overall by the Lakers following his one season in Kentucky in 2014.

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Kentucky gets early signature win at Champions Classic against Duke | Opinion

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Kentucky gets early signature win at Champions Classic against Duke | Opinion


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ATLANTA — We’re going to have plenty of time, like maybe a decade or two, to talk about Cooper Flagg. And in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Champions Classic, the presumptive No. 1 pick is going to get his first real taste of what the world of sports takes is all about. 

That’s how it works when you live up to the hype for 39 minutes but mishandle a ball in a crowd and then dribble it off your foot with the game on the line. Better get used to it. 

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But Flagg is 17 years old and Duke is still Final Four caliber team. It’s way too soon to start nitpicking. 

It is not, however, too early to render a judgment on the other big storyline from a remarkable night of college basketball.

Mark Pope? Yeah, he’s the real deal, too. Just a couple weeks into the college basketball season, he’s already made Kentucky basketball fun again. 

It’s been awhile. 

“This group is special,” Pope said after Kentucky’s 77-72 victory, giving him a signature win right out of the gates and at a time when there was — and probably still is — some uncertainty about whether he’s up to this mammoth job. 

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Time will tell. But one thing you can already see: There’s a major vibe shift around Kentucky basketball.  

Freed from the tension of John Calipari’s stubbornness, his deteriorating relationship with Kentucky’s administration and his antagonistic posture toward a fan base that cares like no other in sports, Big Blue Nation will not find this kind of basketball difficult to embrace. 

It’s beautiful, it’s energetic, and most of all its drama-free. 

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Yeah, Kentucky needed a change. They got it. And it looks as if they’re really, really going to like it. 

Nothing against Calipari, a Hall of Fame coach whose first 10 years there were phenomenal. But the whole operation got stale, it got contentious, and his last four seasons were a slow-motion train wreck that ended with some embarrassing NCAA tournament defeats. 

Still, when Calipari left for Arkansas, there were no guarantees about how it would go for Big Blue Nation. After all the big names said no, the initial reaction to Pope was strongly negative. 

Despite being part of Kentucky’s 1996 national title team, he was still a coach with no NCAA tournament victories in nine years at Utah Valley and BYU. 

Kentucky fans, of course, quickly embraced Pope because there was really no other choice. He wasn’t just one of theirs, he reminded them what that actually meant. For 15 years, the program was about the Calipari brand. From the first moment he got the job, Pope was determined to flip that back around and make Kentucky the star of the show. 

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That’s a great way to start a honeymoon, but you also have to show it on the floor. And with a roster that Pope pulled together largely from the transfer portal, there was a scenario where Year 1 was basically a write-off.

“Nobody knew each other,” Pope said. 

But you can already see that Pope is really good at three things that will serve him well as Kentucky’s coach. 

The first is that he is incredibly dialed in to how players interact with each other and feed off each other. He talked, for instance, about the human nature for people to pull away from problems and the intentionality it takes to do the opposite. You saw that Tuesday when Kentucky got down 10 points in the first half and just kept hanging in the game until the experience and physicality of its older players took over in the final minutes 

“I felt like it was really special for us,” said senior Andrew Carr, a forward who transferred from Wake Forest and scored 17 points with two huge and-1 finishes in the final minutes. “Not everything was going our way, and coach talks about turning into each other, the people that matter, and the closer we get it’s harder to beat us.”

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The second big trait of a Pope team is the offense. It just flows. For years, one of the big frustrations fans had with Calipari is that the ball didn’t move enough, there wasn’t enough spacing and he didn’t emphasize 3-point shooting until his final season. With Pope, that’s not an issue. The ball zips around, guys move off the ball and everyone has the green light to shoot when open. This was the ballgame: Kentucky made 10-of-25 threes to Duke’s 4-of-23.

And the third thing is that Kentucky just plays really, really hard, which it will need to do against most teams. The Wildcats have some good pieces, but they won’t have a huge talent advantage in most of their big games — and they certainly didn’t against a Duke team with multiple future NBA draft picks. That’s arguably the biggest reason why Kentucky’s effort just wore down Duke to the point where Flagg was too exhausted to execute down the stretch after scoring 26 points and grabbing 12 rebounds in 32 minutes. 

“Guys went and sat in the locker room (at halftime) and it was constructive,” Pope said. “Guys do most of the fixing before I get in the locker room. It was just sheer resolve and determination. There was a lot of ebb and flow, and the game almost swung away from us, and the guys reeled it in.”

It’s still too early in the college basketball season to draw a whole lot of conclusions about where either Kentucky or Duke is going to end up. But for Pope, a man who arguably has the best but toughest job in college basketball, it was a validating night. 

He said after the game that he’d have felt the same way about his team whether they won or lost, and that’s probably true. But beating Duke is no small thing, and the amount of belief and credibility Kentucky will get from this win will have a cascading effect on the fan base, on recruiting and on the confidence of a team that believes it might have something special. 

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All in all, Big Blue Nation couldn’t have asked for anything more.

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Kentucky vs. Duke game thread and pregame reading

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Kentucky vs. Duke game thread and pregame reading


It’s finally here, BBN. The Kentucky Wildcats and Duke Blue Devils are set to face off in the 2024 Champions Classic.

Game time is set for approximately 9 PM ET on ESPN following Kansas vs. Michigan State, which tips off at 6:30. You can watch the game online using ESPN+ or listen on the radio via the UK Sports Network.

This is it. This is the game everyone’s been waiting for, and it’s finally happening tonight in Catlanta.

Will the Cats be able to topple the sixth-ranked Blue Devils, or will Duke continue to control this series since that 1998 Elite Eight comeback?

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We’ll find out soon enough!

Pregame Reading


Go CATS!



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La Grange woman wins $60,000 on Kentucky Lottery scratch-off ticket

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La Grange woman wins ,000 on Kentucky Lottery scratch-off ticket


(LEX 18) — The Kentucky Lottery announced that a La Grange woman recently won the top prize of $60,000 on a scratch-off ticket that was purchased at Fast Lane Liquor in La Grange on Oct. 30.

Officials detailed that Rose Richie won the prize after she purchased a $5 Mood Money Scratch-off and won on all 15 spots on the ticket. This resulted in the $60,000 top prize win.

“I kept going and saw another $4,000 and another $4,000,” Richie said. “When I saw the whole board, I knew I hit the $60,000.”

Richie went on to call her husband in excitement, officials said.

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“I was having an anxiety attack,” she said. “I told him, “Honey, please come home, I’m nervous. I’m making sure my eyes are seeing right.”

The following day, Richie headed to the lottery headquarters and received a for $43,200 after taxes while the liquor store that sold the winning ticket will receive $600.

“I’ve been praying for a little nest egg,” she said. “This will help us stay ahead.”





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