WATCH: John Calipari at Kentucky MBB 2023 Media Day

Kentucky men’s basketball wrapped up the program’s annual Media Day on Wednesday afternoon at the Joe Craft Center. Although a fire alarm cut the player interviews short, we were still given the fully allotted time with head coach John Calipari. Unsurprisingly, he had plenty to say.

Calipari dove straight into questions when he took the podium, talking with reporters for nearly 35 minutes before we broke off into player interviews. Of course, he mentioned the status of 7-foot-2 Croatian big man Zvonimir Ivisic and when the Big Blue Nation might finally see him take the court (look for that to be the second exhibition game). In short, Calipari is pumping the brakes right now on setting high expectations for Ivisic, who continues to ramp up into game shape after arriving in the United States less than two weeks ago.

But Calipari also went deep into the transfer portal and NIL, hyped up Rob Dillingham‘s Blue-White Game performance (while also hinting that opposing schools might have tried to recruit Dillingham following his poor play at GLOBL JAM), how he looks at what Las Vegas is saying if he ever gets curious about how his team is being viewed by outsiders, and much, much more. You can listen to everything the head coach had to say below.

Watch the latest John Calipari press conference on the KSR YouTube Channel.

After Calipari finished his press conference, we moved down to the Joe Craft Center gyms where we were allowed to speak with every player on the roster. As mentioned, the fire alarm cut our time short, but we were still able to get a handful of Wildcats on video. You can hear everything they had to say below.

Aaron Bradshaw, Ugonna Oyenso, Kareem Watkins, and Brennan Canada

Zvonimir Ivisic and DJ Wagner