Kentucky basketball officially announces signing of Kerr Kriisa

Former Arizona and West Virginia point guard Kerr Kriisa is officially a Wildcat. News of Kriisa’s commitment broke Wednesday, and on Thursday, the Kentucky Men’s Basketball Twitter account announced him as part of the team.

Here was the official word from an article on the UK Athletics website announcing the addition of Kerr Kriisa:

“dding to the backcourt, Kentucky men’s basketball head coach Mark Pope announced on Thursday that Kerr Kriisa (pronounced KREE-suh), a 6-foot-3 veteran guard who has played at both Arizona and West Virginia, will transfer to Kentucky ahead of the 2024-25 season. He will have one season of eligibility remaining.”

That last sentence is key. Since Kriisa has been around long enough to earn the extra COVID year, this will be his fifth season of college ball. However, he only appeared in eight games as a freshman, but since his absence was due to a suspension he will not be able to get another year back for that season. 2024-25 will be his last in college.

Background on Kriisa the player

Kriisa averaged 11 points and 4.7 assists per game for a Mountaineer team that experienced a year of remarkable turbulence following Bob Huggins’ resignation and a complete roster overhaul just months before the season.

He’s always been a fiery and unique player at the college level since committing to Arizona, coming over from his home in Estonia to suit up for the West Coast Wildcats. Now, he’ll get a chance to represent the ones in blue and white.

Kerr Kriisa has really made his name as two things at the college level: solid point guard play and some flamethrower 3-point shooting. Now, especially early on in his career, the 3-point shots were a little too frequent for how often they fell, as he fired off more than seven per game in 2021-22 but hardly made a third of them (33.6%).

However, in both 2022 and 2023, while somewhat inefficient, Kriisa was still the starting point guard and nearly averaged double figures for a pair of Arizona teams that earned a 1-seed (’22) and 2-seed (’23) in the NCAA Tournament. But he opted to transfer following an NCAA Tournament loss to 15-seed Princeton in ’23 where Kriisa shot 1-7 from the field, all from 3, and turned the ball over four times.

At West Virginia, the situation around him was completely dysfunctional in the aftermath of the Huggins resignation (plus the legal fallout from that whole charade). So it’s hard to judge the team performance as any indictment on Kriisa, but he actually played very well.

On the worst team he’d ever played on, Kriisa provided his best performance, averaging a career-high 11 points to go along with strong assist numbers. But the real development in Morgantown came from beyond the arc, where Kriisa still fired away his six attempts per game, but in 2024, he made 42.4% of those. Volume stayed the same and percentage went way up, which is what you love to see out of older guys.