John Calipari says Ugonna Onyenso will "be out a while"

The regular season is still months away, but it sounds like Kentucky will be down both of its seven-foot centers for the foreseeable future.

Following the Wildcats’ gold medal-winning victory over Team Canada on Sunday night, head coach John Calipari revealed some sour news: sophomore big man Ugonna Onyenso, who suffered an ankle injury during a closed scrimmage on Tuesday against Team Africa and did not play the rest of the week, is going to miss significant time.

“I feel bad for Ugo, he’s gonna be out a while,” Calipari said. “Feel bad for him.” A reporter responded by asking “Longer than you thought?”, to which Calipari replied “Yes”.

Ultimately, Kentucky didn’t need Onyenso to run the table at the 2023 GLOBL Jam Tournament up in Toronto, Canada. The ‘Cats won all four games by an average of 15.3 points, beating Team Canda twice en route to winning the gold medal. But his injury is still a cause for concern.

Kentucky is already without 7-foot-1 five-star freshman Aaron Bradshaw to a foot injury that required him to undergo surgery. Initial reports indicated Bradshaw could miss the start of the 2023-24 season for UK, although Calipari believes he could be ready to rock for the season opener if all goes well with his rehab.

“Not from what the doctors are telling me,” Calipari said in June when asked if Bradshaw will miss the start of the season. “We will not rush him back. We won’t. You know it’s — for what he did and how he did it and how quickly, like, when he decided it, it was a day and a half later, two days later, he had the operation. So he wants to play, yes.”

The good news in all this? Kentucky won’t play another real basketball game until early November — over three months from now. That’ll give plenty of time for recovery, but the severity of Onyenso’s injury is still unknown. The Athletic’s Kyle Tucker reported Monday morning that Onyenso actually flew back to Lexington ahead of the gold medal game in order to see if surgery will be necessary.

Kentucky still looked quite impressive without both of the versatile big men, but there’s no denying that Calipari will need them both healthy once the season does roll around. If there was one area where UK was exposed in Canada, it was on the glass. Kentucky was outrebounded by 3.5 boards per game at GLOBL Jam.

The frontcourt situation could have been even worse on Sunday, too.

Calipari also revealed after Kentucky won gold that 6-foot-9 West Virginia transfer forward Tre Mitchell injured his ankle in Saturday’s win over Team Africa. Luckily, Mitchell was able to fight through the pain and even played his best game of the week: 18 points (8-12 FG; 2-4 3PT), 11 rebounds, and five assists.

“Tre, hurt his ankle last game. We didn’t think he was gonna play today,” Calipari said. “So I’m like, okay, Adou (Thiero) you’re gonna be our center. Now we got six guys, I mean you can’t even have a warmup line. And so he ended up getting through the night, next day the game, thank God, was at night so he could play. And then played as good as he’s played since we’ve been here. I said you need to play with a hurt ankle all the time. He was good.”

This week was a ton of fun for the Big Blue Nation, but now it’s time to hunker down and make sure everyone is healthy and ready to roll for the beginning of the season this fall.