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Will Brown chuckled last month when he heard that Kentucky coach John Calipari said of his team, “We stink” right now.
“I laughed a couple weeks ago when I saw that Cal said his team stinks. I laughed,” Brown, the Albany coach, said by phone on Wednesday morning. “He’s got a really difficult problem to figure out, let me tell you.”
Brown, whose Great Danes have been to three straight NCAA Tournaments, will open the 2015-16 college season at No. 2 Kentucky on Friday night.
NJIT, which won at Michigan as an independent last season and is now the newest member of the Atlantic Sun Conference, visits the Wildcats on Saturday. Both teams are playing Kentucky as part of an exempt event run by the Basketball Hall of Fame.
“They’re a little scary,” NJIT coach Jim Engles said. “It’s hard to put into perspective from where they were last year, but it looks like they’re as talented as they were last year” when they went 38-0 to start the season before losing in the national semifinals.
“Kentucky’s really worried about us and NJIT,” Brown added. “They’re playing us back-to-back. I guess they’re trying to get warm for the Duke game they play a couple days later. That game comes in the Champions Classic in Chicago, where more than 60 NBA personnel are expected.
Kentucky has three players projected in the Top 18 of the 2016 NBA Draft according to DraftExpress.com in center Skal Labissiere (No. 1), wing guard Jamal Murray (No. 6) and point guard Isaiah Briscoe (No. 18).
Neither Albany nor NJIT has a projected draft pick and Brown joked that the only thing his players know about the lottery is how to play it.
“Our guys buy lottery tickets,” he said. “You know, Powerball, Mega Millions.”
“I think it’s a win-win for us,” Brown added. “We’re opening up the season against arguably the most talented and best team in the country. Even though they’re young, they’re loaded at every position. It’s a difficult task, especially to open the season. I don’t know if there’s any good time to play Kentucky but I think right now you look at their team, in my opinion they have the best point guard in the country in Tyler Ulis. I think they’ve got a possible No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft in 2016 in Skal Labissiere. And I’ll say it now before everybody jumps on the bandwagon, I think Jamal Murray might be the best player in the country. He reminds me of a combination of Mark Jackson and Andre Miller with a jump shot because he can post you up, he’s got size, he can run a team and he can really shoot that thing. And then you get a kid like Isaac Humphries who’s too young for the 2016 NBA Draft so I just think what makes them so dynamic heading into this year is that they start three point guards and I think that’s very unusual. All three will be in the NBA but I think they’re all smart enough to realize that that’s Tyler Ulis’s show to run.”
Engles, the NJIT coach, has similar praise, and similar concerns.
“It’s an interesting dynamic because they’re obviously a new team, most of the guys are new to the program, but they’re so talented,” he said. “Murray and the big kid [Labissiere], they gotta be in talks for 1 or 2 in the draft. So when you have that type of talent and you have those types of kids who can come in and spell them, I don’t see how they take a step back from last year.”
Engles said his team is focused “on themselves” and isn’t really focusing on the opponent. The Highlanders are led by junior guard Damon Lynn (pictured), who averaged 17.2 point last season.
“I think they’re all hyped up to play Kentucky, which is great,” Engles said. “I think with Isaiah Briscoe there, I think a lot of the guys actually know them, so it’s going to be good to get down there and play in Rupp Arena. For us, it’s going to be more about we beat Michigan last year and we were just focused on how we played the whole time, and I don’t know if we’ll really change much for this.”
As for Albany, they return three all-conference perimeter players in point guard Evan Singletary (13.0 ppg), Tulane transfer Ray Sanders (9.7 ppg) and Australian sensation Peter Hooley (13.7 ppg), who hit the game-winning 3-pointer to send Albany to the NCAA Tournament last season.
“We’re going there to win, we’re preparing to win,” Brown said. “I think there’s some things that we can do that can bother Kentucky. I mean, we are an experienced, veteran team. We’ve been to three straight NCAA Tournaments, so I’d be really shocked if we are not relaxed and we don’t play well. We have to play five-on-five, that’s the key to the game. We cannot allow them to get out in transition. I think they’re going to be really good in transition this year because they can outlet the ball to any of those three perimeter guys because they’re all point guards.”
Brown said the toughest think about playing Kentucky was trying to prepare.
“You can’t simulate their length in a practice,” he said. “That’s the hardest thing. I saw Calipari was pressing for 40 minutes regardless of the score in their exhibition games, and he said they were doing it for conditioning. I expect them to come out and go for the knockout punch early and often against us. And we’re going to be aggressive and attack the pressure to score, but like I’m telling those guys we really need to value that ball because we cannot simulate their length and once they break pressure they’ve got the big fella there waiting to punch your shot to Ashley Judd in the 15th row.
“But we’re excited, we’re looking forward to it.”
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