Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: NBA Edition

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Big Blue Nation, and welcome to the Tuesday Morning Quickies.

As we lurch forward into tournament season, the Kentucky Wildcats are demonstrating exactly what we have seen with teams of this experience before (2014, anyone?) — inconsistency. The loss at Florida looked very similar to the loss the Wildcats suffered in College Station against Texas A&M, and was a reversion to last month’s nasty basketball.

But this team has been a poor road performer all season long, and the road games are done. Now, Kentucky gets to play at neutral sites, and all I can say is this: No excuses.

NBA One and Done

Okay, moving on to the even bigger recent news, comes now the NBA to rescue college basketball with some as yet undefined removal of the “one and done” rule. There are no details other than re-engaging young players earlier and providing them with “better training.”

What this appears to boil down to is going back to drafting high school players, then providing something like the G-League (as the NBA development league is now known) for those players who wish to earn money right away and not go to college who might be good enough to make it in the league eventually.

How this will help eliminate the agents from college basketball is questionable, at best, to me. Even if the NBA siphons off the elite talent and the promising-but-needing-money next level, that still leaves a lot of talented players going to college basketball. Many of them will become NBA prospects, which will instantly draw flies in the form of NBA agents.

But it’s early. Perhaps something meaningful will come out of this discussion, and I think it’s a good discussion to have. My concern is an overreaction to the whole FBI thing, which could result in a system that does more harm than good. The NBA is a business, not a social services organization (no matter how hard they try to convince us otherwise), and the impact to the league’s bottom line is always going to be the driving force.

Tweet of the Morning

Heh.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

• Kentucky has yet another quarterback battle on its hands, and Mark Stoops says he is looking for one main thing: efficiency.

Kentucky basketball

• If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you know that University Heights junior Kyky Tandy has been tearing it up, and garnering interest from Kentucky despite his relatively unknown status nationallly.

Related: Kyky Tandy scores 33 points in front of Coach Cal.

• Coach Cal asks for prayers for his good friend, Alltech founder Pearse Lyons, who has been hospitalized for months due to complications from a heart procedure.
• Yahoo has more information about Bam Adebayo’s alleged meetings with professional agents before coming to Kentucky. The latest is a receipt detailing a meal that Bam supposedly had with ASM agent Stephen Pina, and that Pina allegedly paid for. Total cost: $102.68, at the Melting Pot.

Bam denies being there. Hope he remembers that we live in a time where there are cameras everywhere.

As an aside, the byline on that article makes me want to hurl. Hat tip: Courier-Journal.

• Calipari says UK will have to “fight like heck” to have a chance in the SEC Tournament.
• Four steps to Kentucky’s tournament season success.

Other Kentucky sports

• Kentucky sweeps Southeast Region women’s indoor track and field awards for the second year in a row.
• Two UK women’s basketball signees named Naismith High School All-American honorable mention.
• No. 8 Bat Cats open a home stand with in-state opponents starting today vs. EKU.

Related: Luke Heyer named SEC Player of the Week.

Links posts

• The Leach Report: Tuesday Wildcat Links

College football

• Where will Lamar Jackson go in the NFL Draft? This one says #21, which sounds like the correct neighborhood to me.
• NFL Draft Combine news from SB Nation.

College basketball

• LaVar Ball vs. Jeff Goodman. Can they both lose, please?
• TBS is taking over the NCAA Tournament Selection Show. Will they learn from CBS’s 2016 debacle?

Other sports news

• Can Serena Williams pass Margaret Court’s Grand Slam record? I suspect she will. In fact, I’d bet on it.
• Damien Lillard got… hot. One of these threes is from another zip code, and one is right in Julius Randle’s eye.

• Shaq Diesel, ladies and gentlemen…

Other news

• Scientists find breakthrough technique to separate two liquids using a laser.
• Scientists think they have discovered radio signals providing evidence of the first stars to come into existence, and as an aside, think they may have discovered dark matter as well.
• The most powerful weapons in the Marvel universe. I’ll take Mjölnir, you can have the rest.