Kentucky basketball has had an up and down season, and Mark Pope believes a large portion of that is down to fatigue, but not everyone agrees, not even his own players.
Andrija Jelavic doesn’t believe Mark Pope’s ‘fatigue excuse’
Mark Pope has been on and on about fatigue all season long. He said the team doesn’t play its best when it is tired. He uses analytics to defend his rotations.
It’s production numbers. It’s kind of a tool that gives us a summation of their contribution on the court. It’s their offensive efficiency plus their defense efficiency and a couple other metrics in terms of kind of showing us how guys develop as they go from one minute to two minutes, three minutes to four minutes to five minutes, six minutes all the way to 10 minutes consecutive play. And so it’s one of a number of things that we consider as we work on guys’ rotation.
But one of his starters, Andrija Jelavic, isn’t having any of it. Speaking after the loss to reporters, Jelavic had a lot to say about it. He flat-out said “No” when asked if fatigue had anything to do with the losses.
We are all 19-21-year-old kids. We don’t have problems with playing a lot. If you can’t play two games in a week, you can’t play in the NBA. If you can’t do it here, you can’t do it at the next level.
And I think he is right. These guys are in the prime of their lives; they are young enough to play 35 minutes every 3 or 4 days. Jelavic continued, “Everyone plays at the same pace that we do. Everyone plays Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, that’s not the problem.”
In Mark Pope’s defense, Kentucky does have the 10th most possessions per game in NCAA basketball, but you know who number 1 is? Alabama. Let’s look at their roster’s minutes.
Labaron Philon- 30 MPGAmari Allen- 28 MPGAden Holloway- 28 MPGLatrell Wrightsell- 27 MPGAiden Sherrell- 23 MPGHouston Mallette- 23 MPG…