Given mere months to construct a roster after being hired as Kentucky’s head coach last spring, there was no way Mark Pope and his staff could’ve familiarized themselves with the entire transfer portal in such a short amount of time.

Yet, based on what he calls the “Moneyball” approach, he plucked Ansley Almonor from the bottom of the figurative transfer portal barrel. Coming into the season, he was ranked 345th on On3’s list of players looking for a new home.

Now? Almonor started a long stretch of SEC games in Andrew Carr’s absence and has tallied a number of big performances, including a season-high 13 points in a home win over the fifth-ranked Tennessee Volunteers earlier this month.

The “Moneyball” Approach

“I didn’t know Ansley at all before I was here at Kentucky,” Pope admitted in his presser on Thursday. “We have a bunch of different prongs of our portal attack, and one of them is kind of the Moneyball space of how we run with guys in the portal.“

“You have your Excel spreadsheet with all of the columns of data, and we start to say, ‘Okay, let’s forget the algorithm that puts all that data together and then ranks players, and let’s just only go to like these three data points and throughout all the other data and see who raises to the top of the list if we do that?”

Enter: Almonor, a transfer from Farleigh Dickinson, flying well under everyone’s radar.

“His name came up pretty prominently on a list of guys we’re like, what do you think? Is there any way?” Pope said. “And then we started to watch film… He was a good scorer, and he had a creative vibe as a cutter. He had a real sense about, kind of finding open space.”

An Every Man

“And clearly we’re attracted to his ability to shoot the ball, and then you hear that he beat Purdue in the first round (of the 2023 NCAA Tournament). And so there’s that little component, like man, he’s played in big games and all that stuff kind of coming together.”

Almonor has gone from very few minutes a game to a starting role on a team fighting for a top seed of the NCAA Tournament, including every transitional phase in-between, and has kept the same level-headed composure through it all.

Not every transfer find will be a hit like this one, but when you’ve got a coach who knows how to dig and a staff armed with shovels, you’re bound to strike gold now and again, and Ansley Almonor is just that.

At the end of the Kentucky-Oklahoma game on Wednesday night, tempers ran high as they often do in close games in the spirit of competition. Not just among players, as was seen with Brandon Garrison and Oklahoma’s Jalon Moore, but also fans.

As the Wildcats were exiting the court to the locker room, an Oklahoma fan was seen throwing a beer can at the players, nearly hitting Garrison.

In response, the Oklahoma Athletic Department released the following statement on Thursday afternoon:

We are aware of an incident that occurred following last night’s men’s basketball contest against Kentucky involving the throwing of a beverage can toward players. We are closely reviewing all available footage and are working to identify involved parties. We are also in communication with the Southeastern Conference. Anyone with information regarding the incident should provide that by emailing [email protected]. The University of Oklahoma does not in any way condone this type of fan behavior and it will not be tolerated. We will take appropriate and necessary action against anyone who conducts themself in such a manner. We apologize to University of Kentucky players, coaches and fans.

Last fall, the SEC threatened to ban fans for a season if they were found to throw trash onto the playing surface or at players, as a result of fans doing so during the Texas-Georiga football game.

Amari Williams has become the Kentucky Wildcats’ most important player and is deserving of All-SEC honors. Through SEC play, the big man has averaged a near double-double with 11.9 points, 9.1 rebounds, and 3.7 assists in just 24 minutes.

With Lamont Butler and Jaxson Robinson out of the lineup to injuries the last three games, Williams’ numbers have leaped to 17.3 points, 9.7 rebounds, and 3.3 assists, with just a small bump in minutes to 27 per game.

That begs the question: Should Williams be playing more minutes?

Mark Pope says no.

“Efficiency drops when Amari’s off the floor. It also drops when Amari is on the floor a little bit too long,” Pope said on his Monday call-in show. “As he gets stretched and stretched, you start to see cracks in what he’s able to do energy-wise. He’s most efficient and most impactful when he can be somewhere between 20 and 28 minutes.”

Pope has mentioned multiple times a study that he and the rest of the staff conducted earlier this season to find each player’s most efficient stretches in the game. He has leaned on that to this point, and it doesn’t sound like he will be going away from it anytime soon.

Looking at his career minutes, Williams has only had one season where he averaged more than 23 minutes per game, his junior season at Drexel (27.4 mpg). Last season, as a fourth-year senior, he averaged nearly five minutes less per game (22.9 mpg) but still maintained the same player efficiency ratings while improving efficiency in other areas.

Not playing 30 minutes for the majority of his career, and Pope sticking to the analytics, it looks like Williams will continue to play around that 25 minutes per game. That means Brandon Garrison needs to take a step and help close that gap of productivity with March just on the horizon.

If you look at the metrics, Garrison has been part of many of Kentucky’s least-efficient lineups this season.

That needs to change in a big way for Kentucky to stay above water whenever Williams leaves the game. We’ve seen flashes from Garrison throughout the season — including his recent outburst vs. South Carolina — but he’s not come close to putting it together on a game-to-game basis like Williams has.

Of course, it wasn’t that long ago when Williams was enduring his own struggles. Some even wondered if Garrison should be taking more of his minutes early in SEC play, but thankfully, Williams has since turned the corner in a big way.

Can Garrison follow suit?

Also posted on A Sea of Blue.