John Calipari focused on good team habits, not all-time wins record

Kentucky returned to its rightful place atop the college basketball world just in time for the start of the regular season. With Kansas forced to vacate a total of 15 wins following the program’s IARP ruling in October, the Wildcats are back at No. 1 on the all-time wins list with 2,375 — 2,376 after the team’s season-opening win vs. New Mexico State.

A technicality, sure, but an official record nonetheless.

Does John Calipari care? Well, not in the way you might expect. His job is to take the weight off his players’ shoulders with things like that, ignoring the clutter and focusing on getting better. Records like that are for us, the fans.

“I’m trying to get these kids to take all that kind of stuff off their plate and just learn to play,” Calipari said following the 86-46 win. “Here’s my new (thing) that I’ve been riding really hard — we’re trying to help them develop habits. Not break old habits, they’re there. We’re just trying to make these new habits more dominant than those old habits.”

Among them? Justin Edwards spinning with the ball in traffic, which resulted in a few turnovers in his debut.

“You can’t spin like that. You’ve got to stay facing, and if you can’t, back out. But you cannot spin. He had three turnovers today spinning. That happens in these games.”

Another? Getting after it on the glass, especially the guards. With Kentucky missing three 7-footers due to injury and illness, the Wildcats are thin in the frontcourt. And they’re replacing one of the greatest rebounders college basketball has ever seen in Oscar Tshiebwe.

The boards have to come from somewhere. That takes new habits.

“We rebounded today because the guards rebounded. Robert (Dillingham) got five, Reed (Sheppard) got five. Antonio (Reeves) stuck his nose in there a few times. It’s going to be who we are going to have to be,” Calipari said. “Last year we had one of the best rebounders in a generation. Like, we may never see that in our lifetime again, what we saw for the two years Oscar was here.

“Now we have got to do it a little differently. One, we’ve got to block out. That means everybody. We’ve got to gang rebound, stuff like that.”

Those are the things he’s focused on with his team, not a number next to the program’s name. He doesn’t want his players worried about being the next historic Kentucky team, he simply wants them to be the best versions of themselves.

Because that’s a group that can be pretty darn good.

“We want to do that, we want our fans to take pride in what we’ve been able to do,” he said. “The other side of it is, I don’t want them to compete with a five-year period that was never done before, trying to compete against that. Let’s just compete against ourselves and see how good we can be.”

Fortunately for him, those two things go hand in hand. As this team develops and grows closer as a unit, the wins will stack up organically. In turn, that’ll keep the gap between Kentucky and Kansas right where it needs to be.

“We want to do that for the fans, but I’m trying to get us to think about playing against ourselves,” Calipari said. “How good we can be? How do we get these other habits to be dominant habits that we’re trying to play with?”

Earning a win in the Champions Classic next week isn’t a bad place to start.