What has gone wrong with Louisville basketball? And how quickly can Kenny Payne fix it?
It was a cause for celebration on that March morning a little more than nine months ago when Kenny Payne was introduced as the new University of Louisville men’s basketball coach.
To U of L fans, it must seem like an eternity has passed since that day.
Following the initial hoopla that surrounded Payne’s ascension as leader of Cardinals hoops — a happy moment for a proud program welcoming back one of its greats — the actual results on (and off) the court haven’t been there.
No one thought this was going to be an easy turnaround for a team that went 13-19 the previous season — with former coach Chris Mack let go in the middle of the season — and a program that hasn’t won an NCAA Tournament game since Rick Pitino was fired amid controversy more than five years ago.
Payne laid out the difficult path ahead during his March 18 introduction as U of L’s new coach — an impressive example of how to “win the press conference” — telling fans, former players, university officials and anyone else who cared about Louisville basketball that he would need their support every step of the way.
“Support is very critical,” he said then. “You understand what I mean by support. It’s not when you’re doing good. Support is really when you’re doing bad. I need you. …
“(To) this community, I don’t have all the answers. But, I know that I had to take this job and try to help build the answers.”
Payne spoke that day like a coach who knew there would be bumpy roads at the beginning of this journey, but he took the longer view of Louisville basketball and envisioned a future in which the Cardinals were back at the top of the sport.
Thirteen games into his tenure — and with his first rivalry date with Kentucky coming up Saturday — a return to the top seems a long way off.
U of L lost its first nine games of the season, including dropping the first three to Bellarmine, Wright State and Appalachian State — all three of those defeats coming in the Yum Center. And even before that — in the Cardinals’ exhibition opener — they lost to Division II foe Lenoir–Rhyne, a sure sign of the tough times ahead.
How bad is Louisville?
The numbers behind U of L’s season are staggering.
Those nine consecutive losses to open the 2022-23 campaign marked the Cards’ worst start to a season since 1940-41.
Louisville’s overall KenPom rating coming into the week — 256th nationally — is the worst among major-conference college basketball teams.
A look through the statistics makes for a terrifying read. The Cards are averaging 61.4 points per game. That ranked 343rd in the country coming into this week.
There are 363 Division I college basketball teams, for reference’s sake.
Louisville’s field-goal percentage: 40.0. The Cards’ three-point percentage: 31.9. They’re being outrebounded by 2.1 boards per game. U of L’s assist-to-turnover ratio: 0.52. The team’s scoring margin: negative-12.1 points.
Coming into the week, the Cardinals ranked 277th nationally in three-point-shooting and 283rd in rebounding margin. In the rest of those categories, they were in the 300s.
Against good teams, they haven’t come close. Arkansas beat Louisville by 26 points. Texas Tech beat the Cards by 32. Maryland beat them by 25. Miami won by 27.
Following that loss to the Hurricanes — to make Louisville 0-8 on the season — Payne reiterated his initial call for patience and support.
“I knew it was gonna be hard to rebuild this thing,” he said. “In no way am I discouraged about anything that I’ve been through, anything that we’ve done.
“Stick with us. Be a part of it, not just when it’s good, but also when it’s bad.”
The next day, a 1-9 Florida State team defeated Louisville by 22 points.
Four days after that came U of L’s best showing, by far, to date — a 94-82 victory over Western Kentucky. In that one, the Cards shot 54.4 percent from the floor and made 13 of 25 three-pointers. The performance has been the outlier of the season.
U of L followed up that game with another victory, but it came against Florida A&M — by any measure, one of the worst teams in college basketball — and the Cards had to fight out a 61-55 win at home, leading just 22-20 at the half. (Kentucky looked pretty bad and still beat Florida A&M by 20 points last week.)
And what happened next in Louisville? A 75-67 home loss to Lipscomb.
Payne said the visitors to the Yum Center that night were tougher and more disciplined, specifically lamenting that his team was outrebounded 40-26, but acknowledging that the Cardinals needed an across-the-board overhaul.
“We have to address the elephant within our team,” he said. “Turnovers. We gotta address it. Rebounding. We gotta address it. Passing the ball. We gotta address it. Continuity on offense — spacing. We have to address it. Toughness, conditioning, playing basketball when you’re tired. We have to address it.”
At one point, he mentioned the obvious.
“If that’s who we are, it’s gonna be hard for us to win,” Payne said.
Two days later, North Carolina State beat Louisville by 12 points in Raleigh. The Cards stuck with the Wolfpack for the entire first half of that one before falling behind quickly out of halftime.
After that loss — with nine days until the team’s next game, at Kentucky — Payne said he told his players to go home for a couple of days and enjoy the Christmas break with their families.
“But I also want them to think about what more they can do to bring more to the table,” he said. “What more can they do — each individual — to help us get over the hump. And I think they need this break. But I think they need it for a couple of reasons. Obviously, it’s Christmas — great time of the year. But also to mentally reflect on, ‘What do I truly want? What do I truly want this team to be?’
“The second half of this is coming fast, and we’re going to be playing some really good teams. So we have to be on point. We have to be 100-percent bought in. And go in there and fight. For everything we get.”
The U of L roster
How did the Cardinals get here? Well, the roster wasn’t exactly stacked with talent following the Chris Mack era. The former Xavier coach also came to Louisville amid much fanfare — seemingly a coup of a hire at the time, given the Cards’ status with the NCAA — but never won an NCAA Tournament game, presided over more controversy within the program, and ultimately left before his fourth season was finished.
He also left Payne with something of a bare cupboard.
The returnees from that 13-19 team were El Ellis (20.5 minutes per game last season), Jae’lyn Withers (18.2 minutes), Sydney Curry (13.7 minutes) and the relatively little used JJ Traynor and Roosevelt Wheeler, along with redshirt freshman Mike James, who missed his first year at Louisville after suffering a torn Achilles tendon in the 2021-22 preseason.
Payne and his coaching staff — Danny Manning, Nolan Smith and Josh Jamieson — were able to keep a previous commitment from Kamari Lands (the No. 68 recruit in the 2022 class) and get new ones from small forward Devin Ree (No. 84) and lightly regarded guard Fabio Basili, but it was too late in that 2022 cycle to make much of an impact, with pretty much every game-changing high school recruit already committed.
There was the transfer portal, however, and Louisville’s lack of activity there is certainly a cause for some of these early struggles.
While it’s true that some potential transfers had made decisions regarding their next college destinations before Payne was officially hired — even if those decisions weren’t publicly announced — there were still talented, undecided players left in the portal for the U of L staff.
But by the end of that process, Louisville had added just one impact player: ex-Tennessee forward Brandon Huntley-Hatfield, a former five-star recruit who got off to a rough start with the Vols.
The end result was a Louisville roster that featured some intriguing players in the frontcourt but Ellis as the only proven (or even particularly promising) guard on the entire team. While outside observers waited and waited for the Cardinals’ staff to add somebody to the backcourt, it never happened. Payne had made clear that he wanted to build his program the right way from the beginning, and that ultimately meant not taking chances on players he might not have felt fit his vision for the Cardinals’ future.
The perimeter void was glaring even before the season started, so — bad as Louisville has been — perhaps the product on the court shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Ellis is, by far, this team’s leading scorer. He’s averaging 17.1 points per game, more than double the next-best Cardinals player. He’s also averaging 4.2 assists per game, but he’s committing 4.8 turnovers while forced to try to do too much offensively. He’s also shooting just 37.8 percent from the field. And, with not much help in the backcourt, he’s not getting much rest, playing 34.9 minutes per game.
Ellis played all 40 minutes in that loss to Lipscomb last week.
“I need a bunch of guys playing with that effort, that energy,” Payne said afterward of his top player. “I can live with the mistakes if I got six, seven guys playing hard. Playing together. Just fighting to try and get a win. We’re gonna make mistakes. But don’t let our mistakes come from being tentative, being fearful, being non-confident, being, you know, non-aggressive — on both ends of the floor.”
And, from the outside, that seems to be the biggest point of frustration for Payne, who has repeatedly and publicly implored his players to play harder and smarter while acknowledging the uphill climb they will face on the court most nights.
In the days leading up to that Lipscomb loss — coming off the first two wins of the season — Payne noticed a casual approach from some of his players, something Withers acknowledged after the defeat. A team like this obviously can’t afford to be casual. Against anybody.
Heading into the heart of conference play — and with that Kentucky game coming Saturday — Payne talked about what he wants to see out of a competitive team.
“They’re going to do all the things that it takes to win the game,” he said. “They’re going to follow the game plan. They’re going to remember the plays. They’re going to fight their behinds off to make sure that they come out and give themselves the best chance to win.
“We’re not quite there yet. And we gotta get there. Because, as we all know, the schedule is the schedule. And it’s not getting easier.”
Louisville recruiting efforts
More surprising than Louisville’s win-loss record or its roster construction is what has happened on the recruiting trail.
And that is to say that, so far, basically nothing has happened on the recruiting trail.
In a decade on the Kentucky coaching staff — most of that spent as John Calipari’s top assistant — Payne developed the reputation as one of the nation’s best recruiters. He’s also been the subject of praise from a long list of former Wildcats now succeeding in the NBA who have pointed to Payne as one of the primary reasons for their basketball development. On top of that, he was an assistant coach with the New York Knicks for nearly two seasons, as well as being a first-round NBA Draft pick and NCAA champion.
All of this — along with Payne’s natural ability to connect with players and their families — led to major recruiting expectations for Louisville as soon as Payne was announced as the new coach.
As it stands, U of L has two commitments for next season. One is hometown star Kaleb Glenn, whose father played football for the Cards and who had already committed to the previous coaching staff. The other is Curtis Williams Jr., the No. 67 overall player in the 2023 class.
Neither is considered a program-changing addition. And, at this point in the 2023 cycle, no such players remain uncommitted for next season.
It’s truly a staggering development, and it almost certainly means that Payne and his coaching staff will have to make a major impact in the transfer portal this offseason to put together a roster with significantly more talent than the current one, which rates among the worst in high-major college basketball.
And that could happen, but it will take a lot of work and a lot of luck for Payne and company to pull it off, and it’s not a position they likely want to be in after what is shaping up to be a historically bad season for the Cardinals.
Of course, things didn’t always look so dire on the recruiting front. There was a time over the summer where many in those circles seemed to think that DJ Wagner — the longtime No. 1 player in the 2023 class — would end up at Louisville, where his grandfather, Milt Wagner, had been a star player.
Payne hired the elder Wagner, a longtime friend, in a player personnel role, and predictions of DJ-to-Louisville quickly followed. Behind the scenes, the U of L staff expressed confidence that it would happen. There was also talk that high school teammate Aaron Bradshaw — 2023’s top-ranked center — would follow. That sort of recruiting bombshell is the type of thing that could turn around a program (and make losses of the present seem a whole lot more manageable).
But, the confidence on UK’s end never wavered. Calipari had coached Wagner’s father, Dajuan Wagner, at Memphis, and he’d recruited DJ for years. For a few months there, some outside recruiting analysts didn’t know who to believe. As it turned out, Kentucky landed Wagner (and Bradshaw), and that U of L confidence of the time now looks like nothing more than bluster.
On Saturday afternoon, Payne will bring his Cardinals to Rupp Arena to face the team he helped lead to a decade of success. Wacky things seem to happen in rivalry games, but a U of L victory this weekend would mark one of this series’ most improbable outcomes.
Right now, Payne just needs a little momentum. And it might be a while before he finds it.
Saturday
Louisville at No. 19 Kentucky
When: Noon
TV: CBS-27
Radio: WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Louisville 2-11, Kentucky 8-3
Series: Kentucky leads 37-17
Last meeting: Louisville won 62-59 on Dec. 26, 2020, at Louisville
