The University of Kentucky basketball coaches were sitting courtside for the first major Nike recruiting event of the summer over the weekend, watching one of the fastest-rising players in the country, when Orlando Antigua gave a John Calipari a little elbow to the side.
“I told you so,” the Wildcats’ top assistant apparently told the UK head coach.
The player they’d come to see — soon-to-be-five-star Kyle Filipowski — was putting on a show. This was the first opportunity for Kentucky’s coaches to get a look at Filipowski — a super versatile, 6-foot-11 forward — in person, but the Cats had been tracking him for more than a year.
In fact, UK’s recruitment of Filipowski predates the formation of the Cats’ current coaching staff.
Bruiser Flint, who joined Kentucky’s program last summer, started recruiting Filipowski as an assistant coach at Indiana, his previous job. Antigua, who returned to Lexington in May after spending the past four seasons as an assistant coach at Illinois, had been keeping a close eye on Filipowski since around this time last year.
With college coaches unable to travel from March 2020 until last month due to COVID-19 restrictions, Wilbraham & Monson Academy (Mass.) head coach Mike Mannix had been keeping both Flint and Antigua up to date on Filipowski’s progress from afar. That communication continued when each coach joined Kentucky’s staff, and — even though Filipowski was not publicly linked to UK — Calipari was well aware of him.
“They were telling Cal, ‘This is a kid you’re gonna need to see over the summer, because he’s good enough,’” Mannix told the Herald-Leader on Monday.
Calipari saw for himself this past weekend. UK immediately reached out to Mannix, who coached former Kentucky forward Wenyen Gabriel in high school, to set up a video conference with Filipowski and his family. That call happened Monday afternoon, when Mannix said the “I told you so” exchange between Antigua and Calipari was relayed to the star recruit’s family.
“They were right,” Calipari told Filipowski on the call, according to Mannix. “You’re absolutely good enough to play here. You got a scholarship offer to Kentucky.”
The world of college basketball recruiting has been moving fast since the NCAA allowed coaches to travel again — and high school players to visit college campuses — on June 1, and Filipowski’s rise has been one of the biggest storylines of the summer.
Outside of the national top 100 six months ago, he’s proving himself to be one of the best players in his senior class.
Mannix said the first thing Kentucky fans who take the time to look up Filipowski on YouTube will discover is that his game doesn’t exactly match up with the typical 6-11, 230-pound profile.
“You just watch him handle the ball, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s not a ‘5’.’ There’s not a stretch ‘5’ on God’s green Earth that handles the ball like Kyle Filipowski. I would bet my house on that,” he said. “He is a combo forward. I don’t even pinpoint him as a stretch ‘4’ — sure, that may be where you have to put him in the starting lineup. If you have to give him a position, you probably call him a ‘4’. But at the end of the day, he handles the ball so well that he’s not even your typical stretch ‘4’.”
Mannix said he’s had Filipowski bring the ball up the floor as the team’s point guard coming out of timeouts. WMA uses him in a variety of ways on offense, from handling the ball, to sticking him in the middle of the floor and running it through him, to pick-and-pops and pick-and-rolls and even post-ups, if the opposing defense tries to stick a smaller, quicker defender on him.
“He’s a nightmare of a matchup. Absolute nightmare,” he said. “You can’t have a ‘5’ cover him, because he’s going to go right by him. The best thing you can do is put another very mobile stretch ‘4’ on him, but that’s going to have to be a special player.
“He’s as versatile as they come.”
Kentucky and Kyle Filipowski
Over the final three games of the evaluation period this past weekend, Filipowski averaged 18.0 points and 6.7 rebounds, making five of nine three-point attempts. He had four blocked shots in the game before that run, and he’s led his NY Rens squad to a 6-1 record in Nike play, with the Peach Jam tournament coming up this week.
Those numbers aren’t jump-off-the-page great, but the praise he received this past weekend has been.
Rivals.com’s Jamie Shaw, who is one of the analysts responsible for that website’s national rankings, watched the same games Calipari saw last week and wrote Monday that Filipowski belongs in the discussion for the No. 1 overall spot in the 2022 class.
That would be quite a rise. Right now, Rivals.com has him ranked No. 48 overall. 247Sports has him at No. 40, and ESPN ranks him No. 20 nationally. He’ll be moving up on all of those lists soon enough.
College coaches have been all over his recruitment, and that means Kentucky will be playing catch-up in its pursuit of Filipowski’s commitment.
Last month, he took official visits to Duke, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio State and Syracuse, as well as unofficial visits to UConn and Northwestern. He has scholarship offers from several other major programs, including relatively recent ones from North Carolina and Michigan.
Mannix said those early visits have been meaningful and have helped Filipowski get a better handle on his recruitment. Nationally, the perception is that Filipowski is a major Duke lean, with all eight predictions on his 247Sports Crystal Ball and Rivals.com Future Cast pages in favor of the Blue Devils.
So, did that UK scholarship offer come too late?
“It’s not too late to make him think,” Mannix said.
The high school coach knows that Calipari is meticulous with the scholarship offer process, and he said he prepared Filipowski and his family for this exact scenario months in advance. He told them earlier this year that — even though many other schools made him an early priority — there might still be a day when UK would come through with an offer, and that day might not come until July.
The delay was understandable. With the NCAA dead period lasting until June 1, and the limited opportunities to see recruits last month overlapping with important official visits in Lexington, the UK coaching staff simply didn’t have a chance to see Filipowski play in person.
Once they did, everyone was sold. And when Mannix heard from the Kentucky staff over the weekend, he immediately called Filipowski. He noted that, if it had been just about any other school, he would have simply sent the 17-year-old a text to relay the message.
“Kentucky wants to talk to you,” Mannix told him. “They want to have a big call. I’m calling you because this is the program that’s still out there that’s just different.”
“Let’s do it,” Filipowski replied.
On that Monday call, Calipari laid out his vision for Filipowski, telling the player that he would play him as a perimeter-based stretch forward, putting him on the court alongside a more traditional big man. “He’s not a ‘5’. So that was really important for Kyle to hear,” Mannix said.
Of course, Calipari also said he wanted to get Filipowski and his family to Lexington for an official visit. Whether or not that happens will be the barometer for how serious this recruitment might get.
Mannix said Filipowski had already scheduled an official visit in the fall to UCLA. He’s obviously already seen several other campuses, including Duke, the perceived favorite. The original plan — and the one Mannix thinks is still in place — was for Filipowski to get a little ways into his senior year before making a college decision. That gives Kentucky some time. But how much does he want to travel this fall? And is there still room for UK to make a serious move? Or has he seen enough?
The high school coach said the star recruit, who doesn’t turn 18 years old until November, has a lot of thinking to do over the next few days and weeks.
Maybe — even if he might be leaning in a different direction now — an official visit to Lexington could turn the tide of Filipowski’s recruitment. Calipari said Monday that he wants him and his family to see the full Kentucky basketball experience in person. Perhaps it could be a game-changer.
Mannix, who has always spoken highly of Calipari and the UK program, saw that five years ago when Gabriel was being recruited by Kentucky and ultimately played two seasons for the Cats.
“You know and I know that Zoom doesn’t do it justice,” he said. “Kyle has a pretty good idea, I think, of what comes with going to Kentucky, but that experience is really something else.”
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