LEXINGTON, Ky. — Mark Pope talks differently.

Through seven months on the job, one thing we’ve learned about Kentucky’s new head coach is that he doesn’t talk like any previous Kentucky basketball head coach.

We should have known that, of course. No other Kentucky men’s basketball head coach spent three years in medical school — much less Columbia medical school — or was a Rhodes Scholar candidate or happened to mention that his favorite college teacher was a graduate school English professor.

Still, when you attend a Pope press conference, be it a postgame presser or his weekly Thursday pressers, or listen to him on the radio with Tom Leach, it illuminates how the 52-year-old Pope thinks about and approaches the game.

While John Calipari owned the reputation of preparing players for NBA careers, it is Pope who actually talks like an NBA coach.

Take Pope’s Tuesday night postgame press conference after the Wildcats had defeated Lipscomb 97-68 in Rupp to run their record to 4-0.

“Lipscomb came in having played 34 possessions of zone at 0.511 points per possession,” said the coach. “That’s ridiculous, guys, that’s so good. And so they kind of saved it and went to it in the second half and it was like, you’ve got Koby Brea running around shooting 3s, it’s like, ‘We can’t do that.’ I think we were almost two points per possession, over two points per possession against the zone.”

Yes, that’s analytics. Pope is a numbers guy. It’s obvious he loves to dig deep into the digits. Points per possession. Offensive rebound percentage. Turnover percentage. He spent nine years playing professional basketball and lists ex-NBA coach George Karl as a major influence. Pope’s a “Here’s what the number say” kind of coach. And he’s not afraid to say it.

For example, when talking about Lipscomb on Tuesday, Pope said of the Bisons, “They are almost 10 percent, almost 10 percent, either 9 or 11 percent of their possessions are cuts, which is really high. Guys, you don’t see that a lot.” You don’t hear that a lot, either.

Pope also sets numerical “marks,” as he calls them. He wants to average 35 3-point attempts a game. In fact, Pope was disappointed that while Kentucky made 12 3-pointers against Lipscomb, it only attempted 25. Defensively, he wants to hold the opponents to 39% shooting or below. “That’s our mark,” he said.

One more: “We need to be an under-10 turnover team and that’s got to be a staple of who we are,” he said Tuesday.

Don’t worry. Pope is way too smart to think you can break basketball totally down to a specific science. The players are not robots, he said last week. His predecessor would use “the players are not robots; they’re not machines” line, as well, but Calipari did it in a different way, often to explain a poor performance.

So the numbers are just part of the Pope approach. He has talked in depth about “defensive punches” and “tagging” and “rifle game” and “train track concepts.” After one Pope press conference I joked to my colleagues that Mark is under the mistaken impression that we know something about basketball.

Some may find these coaching clinic-type explanations of X’s-and-O’s unrelatable. Not me. I love this stuff. Bring it on. Even if I don’t pretend to know everything Pope is talking about, it makes me want to know more.

After last week’s 77-72 victory over Duke in the Champions Classic, a video went viral of Pope, in the game’s final moments, telling his team during a timeout that Duke star Cooper Flagg likes to spin toward the lane when he has the basketball.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what Flagg did. And sure enough, there was Kentucky’s Otega Oweh, as the help defender, anticipating the spin and making what turned out to be the game-clinching steal.

To me, that was Pope practicing the Pitino influence. As we all know, Pope was a key member of Rick Pitino’s 1996 national championship team. And there was/is no better preparation coach than Rick Pitino.

As has been said of Pitino, “He coaches every dribble.”

Pope coaches, and talks, that way, too.

____

©2024 Lexington Herald-Leader. Visit at kentucky.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.