NEW YORK -- The NBA Draft is a fun but unusual and certainly peculiar media event. After all, it's one of a handful of awaited happenings on the sports calendar that doesn't involve actual game competition. It's pretty much made-for-TV, lasts five hours, is filled with uncertainty, anxiety, misdirection, foolish promises, endless optimism and nauseated Knicks fans.
It lacks the unnecessary and gaudy multi-day grandeur of the NFL Draft, and because it's compressed into one night, the NBA Draft makes for among the longest television broadcasts of any singular event on the sports calendar. The buildup for it comes fast, really, on the heels of the NBA Finals, and it's really only then when the general sports-interested public zeros in for about a week on the next cluster of prospects entering the league.
It's a lot of guesswork.
And it's the most comfortable, exciting, anticipated night on the calendar for John Vincent Calipari. There is no quick buildup for him here; his entire coaching calendar cycles around this event. What happened on Thursday night in Brooklyn pretty much defines his career. Six years running, he's won a personal kind of championship by way of the NBA Draft. Cal repeated history, getting six of his Kentucky players drafted (which also happened in 2012), and seeing yet another one of his guys go No. 1 overall, the fourth time he's had that happened and the third time in six seasons with Big Blue.
| UK in 2015 NBA Draft | |||
| Player | Team | Round | Pick |
| Karl-Anthony Towns | Wolves | 1 | 1 |
| Willie Cauley-Stein | Kings | 1 | 6 |
| Trey Lyles | Jazz | 1 | 12 |
| Devin Booker | Suns | 1 | 13 |
| Andrew Harrison | Suns | 2 | 44 |
| Dakari Johnson | Thunder | 2 | 48 |
The realm remains in his hands. Calipari has said before that getting his players picked means more to him, means more to the UK program, than winning national championships. Six more guys into the pros, and so how could you say he's wrong? What played out on television Thursday night was essentially another recruiting pitch, the best you could ever ask for, and it was put on by a national television outlet that frequently went to Cal for reaction and what essentially became in-home visits to any future five-stars tuning in to see that latest lot of Wildcats to go pro.
It's become so normal and expected for Cal that you can easily forget how outrageous this is. Unprecedented and probably never again to be duplicated. The stats continue to mount up, bullet points on a resume, an impeccable recruiting dossier, that no other school can come close to competing with. Consider:
He has produced 10 top-10 picks in six seasons.
Fifteen of the 25 players he’s sent to the NBA Draft from Kentucky since he arrived have gone in the first round. Both the “15” and the “25” are records in that timespan, and the 25 picks more the double Kansas and Duke, who both have 12 in that time. Out-pacing other bluebloods by more than two-to-one is completely ludicrous.
Three No. 1 overall picks — in the last six drafts. Kentucky just did in a little over a half-decade what it took Duke, the only other program to have three No. 1 picks, more than a half-century to do.
Five guys picked in the top five since 2010. Almost one per year. And this year marks the fifth time Kentucky’s had two top 10 picks in the same draft.
And of all the guys Calipari has coached since arriving at Kentucky, essentially half of them — seriously, think about this; half of the scholarship players to play for Calipari at UK — have been drafted. You suit up for Cal, you've got a 50/50 shot at earning NBA money. How wholly insane.
On his championship night at the Barclays Center, Calipari makes a few final comments before finally letting his players go. In a way they'll always be his, but this is the last night they're exclusively his.
"Well, I'm really nervous right now," he said around 6:30 p.m. "Guys are moving a little bit. It's a little more fluid. We've had this before, and I can tell you I'm excited but I'm nervous. I haven't eaten, so I'm kind of like -- I'm ready for it to be over so I can get in the car and just go."
Hardly.
You'd never know Cal was eager to leave the building. He bunkers down in the green room, the area in front of the grand stage with 20 mini round tables, 19 invitees, a batch of agents and throngs of family members who always look awkwardly ecstatic to take in this anxiety-driven spectacle. Everyone looks just a little out of place except one man, the guy with the perfectly gelled hair, standing right in the center of the room. Cal’s done this so frequently he practically knows the help by name.
Before NBA commissioner Adam Silver can come out to initiate the ceremony, Calipari’s already gotten his five dozen hugs and how-you-dos in with all the familiars. Karl-Anthony Towns, who will be picked No. 1 at 7:37 p.m., is visibly nervous. Willie Cauley-Stein, the veteran — a junior! — who will go sixth to Sacramento, has a gold-encrusted medallion hanging with his initials. And he’s got a perma-smile. He gets a quick shoulder rub from Cal just before the draft begins.
When Silver utters Towns’ name, he becomes the fourth Calipari player (Derrick Rose, John Wall, Anthony Davis) to earn first call from an NBA commissioner. As he goes through the interview process, Towns is a walking model for the perfect Calipari recruit and human billboard for Kentucky basketball. He’s as media-savvy as any college player I’ve covered in the past five years. He always says the right thing, tries (almost too hard) to show how supremely humble he is. He consistently praises his coaches and teammates. It's extremely hard not to be impressed by Towns, who by now has also inhabited the interviewing cadence and talking-point go-tos of his college coach.
And he's a 7-foot big man who’s the latest No. 1 pick to come out of Kentucky. How are you feeling, Cal?
At 8:54, almost 40 minutes after Cauley-Stein's selection to the Kings, Cal takes a phone call while sitting with Devin Booker. He walks over to Trey Lyles’ table.
"They say it’s you," Cal tells Lyles.
Lyles already knows. He's gone to the Jazz.
Four minutes later, at 8:58, a somewhat surreal scene. Yahoo NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski, sitting all of seven or eight feet from the edge of the green room area, signals to an agent from CAA, Austin Brown (D'Angelo's Russell's agent), that Booker will be picked by the Phoenix Suns. Brown walks over to Booker's table, Cal finds out, and the smile and relief on his face is as big as any of his players' grins from all night. Players, rival agents and coaches are now finding out draft picks not by cellphone, but by the "telephone game" at the draft, well in advance of the pick being announced.
With Booker off the board to the Suns, it's official: Kentucky matches 2005 UNC with four guys gone in the lottery, the most ever. In the second round, Andrew Harrison goes 44th and Dakari Johnson is taken at No. 48. Only one player who left early, Aaron Harrison, isn't selected.
And to those who've scouted and watched, it's clear how Cal's been able to wrangle different guys with different styles. Kentucky’s picks are unalike from a basketball perspective. This fits just how Calipari wants into this modern “positionless” basketball movement, which will likely wind up being a vastly overstated concept on the heels of Golden State's NBA championship. Nevertheless, Cal will use it and recruit with it to turn more teenagers into millionaires in the next two years.
"I want them all to be multi-position players," he said last week.
"It’s just good for the program," Cauley-Stein said. "It shows a bunch of young kids can come together and still win and at the end of the day still get drafted. There’s a lot of scrutiny that coach can’t take young guys and make them win and still be in it for each other."
Those are the words of a player who wasn’t projected by anyone to be an NBA player when he started his career at Kentucky.
“I would have believed it but I don’t think I would have been here.”
Those are the words of Devin Booker, who wasn't surprised to see seven UK players leave early for the NBA, but didn't originally put himself in that group. He expected two, probably three years in Lexington. Not one. Not going No. 13, not this soon. He joins Archie Goodwin, Eric Bledsoe and Brandon Knight, all former Kentucky players under Cal, in Phoenix.
"Being able to be a part of this with six other guys and this is the ultimate dream of all of ours and being a part of it with them, we all know each other are going to be successful no matter what we do,” Lyles said.
As for being one of four lottery picks, he added, "It shows our team was special, that it was unlike any other."
And so this has become the desired yet ironic, perhaps mildly twisted legacy of Calipari. He has a national championship. This September, he'll be inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame. But for the marketing major (of course) from Clarion State, the legacy is in the players recruited, the talent assembled, the Big Sell, is what he is and always will be known for.
That man made pros. That's what his headstone could read. If not that, the classic Cal go-to, "It's about those kids."
And though it's unfair, the titles that didn't come will be a sticking point as much as the ones that did. His career's not over, and more championships could be on the way, but Calipari's already reached six Final Fours (two vacated) and nights like Thursday emphasize to some just how crazy it is that you could make way for 25 NBA players in six years and have one national championship to show for it.
The big win lies in the perpetual nature of college basketball and its semi-pro outlier of a program. Kentucky is not a program, it is not a machine, it is a factory for fostering talent.
Words this week from Jamal Murray, the most recent five-star recruit to pledge to Cal: "After I looked at the history of Kentucky and the players they've had get to the next level, it made me want to go there even more."
This is basically what it comes down to. Consider that 2015 was a down year for Cal on the recruiting trail. He missed out on many five-star guys. Yet Murray's commitment put Kentucky, once again, at the top of the rankings.
"It was about this draft," Cal said of his latest incoming class on Thursday night. "Like, as you look at these players, understand how they've been coached and what they've been trained as. There's not, 'This is who you are; you do these things.' We were teaching them how to play basketball."
The pitches never end. Now Calipari wants to provide half of the NBA's All-Stars, and you'd be a fool not to believe he can do it. He wanted to go 40-0, an unthinkable feat in the modern era, and came two wins away from just that. Only this coach could receive so much criticism for a philosophy of shared playing time that helped a team go 38-1.
Lyles' response on Thursday night to the platoon and success of Kentucky this past year: “Uh, four lottery picks.”
And what does four lottery picks say to you, Devin Booker?
"Talented team, and Cal's great."
Praise be.
As Booker was saying this to assembled media, his former coach had already left the green room. With his lottery quartet off to new homes, his smiles and work for the media and the cameras was done. At least for the rest of this night. Another June, another personal championship achieved for the most revolutionary and culture-changing coach college hoops has ever seen.
