At halftime on Saturday night, after his Kentucky players had outplayed Florida for most of the past 20 minutes yet still found themselves down two points, Wildcats coach John Calipari was asked for his assessment.
"The foul trouble kind of got us out of whack," Calipari told the sideline reporter. "But we're gonna be all right."
The question now is this: Will Kentucky – after losing to Florida, it is 14-5 overall, 4-3 in the SEC and with only two wins over teams ranked in the top 50 on KenPom – "be all right" come March?
And what about next March?
Kentucky is not a pretty team this year. The Wildcats have the potential with their massive size and length to be an elite defensive team, but that potential only comes out in spurts. They're young – this is Calipari's youngest team, ranking 351 out of the 351 teams in college basketball in experience, perhaps the youngest team in modern college basketball history – but the bigger problem is they play young. On Saturday night, desperately in need of a basket trailing with under a minute left, point guard Quade Green clanged a corner 3-pointer off the side of the backboard. You could feel Calipari's blood boiling. They don't move the ball well. They turn the ball over too much. They shoot fewer 3-pointers than all but three teams in college basketball. Their only strength on the offensive end seems to be when they work smaller teams over in the paint.
They're ranked 33rd in KenPom, which is sure to decline after their 66-64 loss Saturday. Ranked No. 18 in the AP Top 25, they'll likely drop out of the rankings after a two-loss week, including one loss to a rebuilding South Carolina team. I thought going into the season they'd be a middling NCAA Tournament seed this year – like a No. 4 seed or a No. 5 seed – but they're trending perilously close to bubble territory. (Jerry Palm's latest bracket had Kentucky as a No. 6 seed.)
The truth is that Kentucky lost three times on Saturday night. It lost to Florida in an all-around ugly performance for both teams. (I should point out here that an egregious no-call on Florida's Jalen Hudson, who mugged a driving P.J. Washington with 2.5 seconds left, cost Kentucky a chance at tying the game. But no one could argue, refs or not, that Kentucky deserved to win this game. No one deserved to win this rock fight.)
The Wildcats lost right around tipoff, too, when top-three 2018 recruit (and international dunking phenom) Zion Williamson announced he wasn't choosing Kentucky for his presumed one-and-done season next year.
And they lost when it was revealed that the school Williamson did pick was Duke. Mike Krzyzewski is beating John Calipari at his own game these days. It's entirely possible that Coach K has five first-round picks in his starting lineup this year, and next year's roster will be the first time in college basketball history where one team has the top three national recruits. These are the records Calipari is supposed to set.
So really: Is Kentucky "gonna be all right?" Long term, will it live up to the massive success that Calipari has had in his first eight seasons at Kentucky?
And this is where this column takes a turn.
Because my answer is "yes."
Let me ask you this: Who were the keys to Calipari's national title-winning season in 2012? Sure, it was Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, the first college teammates to go Nos. 1-2 in the NBA Draft. But the guys who made that team really work were sophomore Terrence Jones and senior Darius Miller.
And who the keys to the team that nearly went undefeated in the 2014-15 season? Yes, they had some amazing freshmen like Karl-Anthony Towns, Devin Booker and Trey Lyles. But what made that team great was that it was a team with both elite talent and big-time experience: Sophomores like the Harrison twins and Dakari Johnson, and junior Willie Cauley-Stein.
Kentucky is a bit of a mess right now if you're judging the Wildcats by their standards. They're not going to be an NIT team like that 2012-13 team, but it should be considered a massive success if this team is in the top three in the SEC, or if it makes the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
But this could turn out to be a good thing for Kentucky.
How many of these Kentucky players would you guess are heading to the NBA after this season? Kevin Knox certainly; he's a mid-lottery pick. Hamidou Diallo you'd assume; the ceiling on his game is so high that an NBA team is sure to snap him up in the first round. But after that, are there really any guarantees? You'd assume Jarred Vanderbilt, but the dude has hardly played so far because of injury. There's buzz around Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, but he strikes me as a Malachi Richardson-type player; a second year of collegiate seasoning could do him wonders. Even if he could go in the first round like Richardson did, he could also get overwhelmed by the size and skill level in the NBA, and really struggle.
I can't think of another Kentucky player who should even be contemplating the draft right now.
So imagine a year from now, when Calipari has his typically elite talent but adds to it that rare element of experience? Wenyen Gabriel and Sacha Killeya-Jones, both one-time top 25 recruits, would be juniors. Quade Green, PJ Washington, Nick Richards and perhaps Vanderbilt and Gilgeous-Alexander – all top-35 recruits – would be sophomores. And they might not have Zion Williamson coming on board, but rest assured that Calipari will still have another bumper crop of freshmen coming in. He already has three top-35-level recruits signed on: small forward Keldon Johnson, point guard Immanuel Quickley, and elite shooter Tyler Herro.
So is Kentucky "gonna be all right" this year? Probably not, at least not by Kentucky standards. Barring some sort of magical transformation (or "tweak"), this is not a Final Four team. It's not an elite basketball team.
But is Kentucky "gonna be all right" next year? Absolutely. And this year's struggles will be, for next season, a blessing in disguise.