John Calipari built perennial contenders at Kentucky with the very best amateur basketball players in America. He shunned experience for one-and-dones. He took in high school All-Americans and churned out lottery picks. He won championships and hundreds of games along the way, and then, in 2021, he scrapped that model for an entirely new approach.
In 2022, on Thursday in Indianapolis, it backfired, and Goliath fell.
Kentucky — big, bad Kentucky — succumbed to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in an opening-round NCAA tournament game that few thought would even be worth watching. The Peacocks, representing a tiny Jesuit school in Jersey City, New Jersey, stunned one of college basketball’s bluest bluebloods in overtime, 85-79.
They dealt Calipari his first first-round tournament loss at Kentucky.
They danced, and jumped joyously, and sent one of college basketball’s most dominant players back to a somber locker room in tears.
Back in Jersey City, their classmates — some of 2,672 undergrads just outside New York City — screamed and bounded around an auditorium, all ecstatic, celebrating an indelible moment.
Their coach, Shaheen Holloway, who’d watched the tensest moments of the upset with arms crossed, stoic, was asked if at any point he’d gotten nervous.
“Nah,” he said. “For what? It’s basketball.”
It was brilliant basketball and ugly basketball and dramatic basketball all at once. Oscar Tshiebwe, Kentucky’s superstar center, scored 30 points and reeled in 16 rebounds, and did everything he could to power the oldest Kentucky team in six decades to the second round.
But his teammates flopped and flailed on the offensive end, making only a third of their field goal attempts. They made only four 3-pointers, and Calipari said that three times, he removed players from the game “because they wouldn’t shoot the ball.”
At the other end, Saint Peter’s guard Daryl Banks III scored 27 heroic points to lead the Peacocks.
“You had 27?” a teammate asked him after seeing a stat sheet. “You’re a baaad boy.”
His fellow junior guard Doug Edert gave Saint Peter’s a stunning lead with just over a minute remaining in regulation. Kentucky’s Kellan Grady, who’d been ice cold all month, answered with a second-chance 3 at the other end. Edert then sent the game to overtime with a runner.
Edert, an eephus-throwing, coffee-chugging mustachioed gym rat, stayed clutch in overtime. After an early Kentucky spurt, he hit another 3 to tie the game at 75.
The Wildcats continued to sputter, allowing Saint Peter’s to take a five-point lead with 30 seconds to go, and never recovered.
Their shooting struggles had not been the story of their season, but became the story of their March flop. “This was an unbelievable group,” Calipari said postgame. “Just picked a bad day to not make a shot.”