John Calipari shares value of playing summer basketball vs. opponents

Kentucky coach John Calipari believes there is a lot for his team to learn by playing in summer basketball games. That’s why for the past two seasons, he’s found ways to make that happen for the Wildcats.

Last year, the team took a trip to the Bahamas to play four games against teams from around the world. This week, Kentucky is one of the teams participating in the GLOBL Jam Tournament in Toronto. There they’ve so far gone 3-0 and will compete for the championship on Sunday.

Following a 104-92 victory against Team Africa (BAL Select) on Saturday, Calipari opened up on the value of summer basketball games while also comparing this year’s trip to last offseason’s.

“Last year was totally just team-building,” he said. “The teams there, we were gonna beat by 30. So it was all team-building. Basketball stuff, I don’t think it really did much. This is real teams being coached. They’re all 23, 22. They’re older players. We have young players. Our average age is probably 19. Maybe the youngest team in the country. To come here and their fans, this isn’t like an empty gym. Then again, wherever if play, the Bahamas, if we played in China, there would be 500 people there somehow.”

Freshmen Reed Sheppard and DJ Wagner played a big role in Saturday’s win with 18 points apiece. Sheppard added eight assists to his stat line while Wagner contributed seven rebounds. Another freshman, Justin Edwards, had 15 points. As Calapari mentioned, the experience of playing against older players should do a lot for their development as they make the transition to high school.

The coach even brought up the idea of making summer basketball a regular event among college basketball, even suggesting that Rupp Arena host one. However, while he said he hopes that happens in the future, he doesn’t see it getting done soon with so much still to work out with NIL and the transfer portal.

“You guys know I’ve been pushing the summer basketball,” Calipari said. “We should be playing some games in the summer. I changed gears and everybody was stunned on the call. They need to pause that. The reason is we’ve got too many other things happening right now. The transfer portal. A kid doesn’t play in the summer and all of a sudden he transfers and he says I’ll go as a walk-on. Then you’ve got name, image and likeness. All kind of stuff that coaches are dealing with. We don’t need to put one more thing on our plate. Coaches were happy that I came out and said, ‘let’s just keep evaluating it.’ Maybe we do summer leagues where we have five guys on a summer league team and let them play that way. Can you imagine having a summer league in Lexington? You could do it in Rupp Arena.”

Calipari added that most of his players were excited to participate in the summer league games. If players at other schools feel the same, he doesn’t see any reason not to give them the opportunity an a yearly basis.

The coaches, however, could take more convincing.

“The players, when we talked about summer league, it was 90% they wanted to do this,” he said. “Coaches were 65%. Then when we all hit this, this hit this year hard. We can’t do that right now. Let’s just keep evaluating and see how we do it. Let’s take care of the players. If they wanna play in the summer league, let’s do something. What we do is about them. So if they want to play in the summer, figure it out. Let ’em play. How do we let ’em play?”

Kentucky has yet to make it past the second round of the NCAA Tournament since 2019, but will hope the experience this summer can help it bounce back in 2023-24. Before that, the Wildcats will face either Germany or Canada for the GLOBL Jam Tournament title on Sunday evening.

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