Azubuike24;1297830 wrote:The last 2 years scared people because Cal proved he can take a brand new and very thin roster to a Final Four. The next year, he had the best talent, but also mixed it together with 3 returning contributors and won a title.
He can get the top 5 recruits every year but that doesn't guarantee anything. The scary thing is once they hit the floor, they seem to buy-in, develop instant chemistry and perform. It's even scarier if not everyone goes pro after 1 year.
Forget recruiting, forget his marketing, forget the name "Kentucky." Somehow, he's taking ultra-talented and individual superstar players and instantly changing their mindset. Similar talents go to many other schools and this never develops. It makes you wonder about a few guys who were rumored to be UK locks who ended up not coming.
Quincy Miller, C.J. Leslie and Josh Selby are just some examples. Not that they are bad, but those guys were projected top 10 picks after their Senior year. Selby went 49th overall, Miller went 38th overall and C.J. Leslie is still in his Junior year at college.
Out of high school, Eric Bledsoe, Doron Lamb and Darius Miller were nowhere to be found on NBA boards. DeAndre Liggins and Josh Harrellson almost didn't even make the cut on Calipari's first roster, yet both are in the NBA.
After reading all of this and some of your other posts on this thread, I get the distinct impression that you are very scared. Or at least moderately frightened. Is this accurate? Lol.
I think you have pinpointed the essence behind what makes Calipari so effective – his prowess as not only a master communicator, but also a great unifier – but I do think you might be undervaluing, or at least understating, how brilliant the Kentucky coach is as a marketer and branding expert. Think direct opposite of Dave Bliss.
With a dynamic recruiting pitch perfectly tailored to today’s single-most important game-changer, the one-and-doner, John Calipari appears to be shooting Kentucky past heights of success that even Rick Pitino couldn’t have envisioned while at the helm of Big Blue Nation. The pitch:
You want to be treated like a rap star and get to the NBA as a teenager? Come to Kentucky, play in front of Rick Ross and in a starting lineup of fellow NBA first round draft picks at the Final Four, and in 24 weeks I will have made you a multi-millionaire. Those are powerful selling points.
Talents such as John Wall and Anthony Davis are going to end up millionaires no matter if they play at Kentucky or not, but the string of No. 1 recruiting classes, Final Fours, last year’s national championship and the annual mass exoduses to the League have fashioned such a strong model for Calipari to tout that it’s becoming increasingly hard for the true one-and-doners who are enamored by the glam and glitter of the NBA-like environment that has been created in Lexington to turn being a Wildcat down. As ironman02 has stated, it’s a brilliant strategy. It’s working so brilliantly, in my view, because Calipari, unlike what the coaches of the other elite programs across the country are doing or are willing to do, is selling the NBA, not the school. Kids like that, because that means it’s entirely about them and their futures. And that’s evidenced by the way he has turned the program into a farm system of sorts, hauling in a new crop of young talent each fall and then sending them to the big leagues in the spring. John Calipari is not allegiant to Kentucky. Kentucky is simply the most effective platform he could find to sell his own personal brand.
Add in the fact that Calipari is one basketball’s brightest minds – you don’t reach four Final Fours without having a brilliant grasp of the game and a prominent aptitude for teaching it – and Kentucky automatically becomes the most attractive destination in the country for star recruits who don’t care what university they are sleeping at for a few months as long as they get to the NBA in the absolute shortest duration of time as dictated by David Stern. As long as Stern’s age rule is in existence, the Calipari formula will be hard to beat because there are many coaches who just will refuse to employ it. Of course, the formula is only as sustainable as the rule.
