Following a 94-78 loss to the Auburn Tigers, where Kentucky was never really that competitive, there was a double dose of bad news.

Mark Pope announced that Jaxson Robinson will miss the remainder of the season.

Robinson who injured his wrist in practice earlier this month, returned to action on Wednesday against Oklahoma, but fell and reinjured the wrist after only 12 minutes of action. That fall was ultimately what ended his season.

“We came to the final conclusion last night that he’s going to get surgery,” Pope started. “He is going Wednesday, to the world specialist, to have surgery on his wrist.”

“He’s got a torn sub-sheath to his ECU tendon. What’s happening is that it is slipping out and when went down we kinda knew he was going to need surgery, but he just wanted so badly to play. He rehabbed it and had an injection to try and make it functional. He was doing okay, then he went down in the first half at Oklahoma.”

“There is no way that he going to be able to play.”

Kentucky has been dealing with injuries for weeks, and while things are trending in the right direction in time for March, the injuries still have to be monitored.

On Friday, during his press conference to preview the Wildcats’ matchup with no. 1 Auburn, Mark Pope provided updates on where his injured players stand after a tough battle with Oklahoma.

“Lamont (Butler) came out great,” Pope said, opening with a positive note. Butler has been dealing with a shoulder injury since mid-January that has kept him out of six of the last nine games. In 20 minutes against Oklahoma, he recorded 7 points and 6 assists, and stated that he felt “no pain” after the game.

Pope also noted that Andrew Carr came out “really good” after the win against the Sooners. The Wake Forest transfer has been playing through back pain since December and is looking much more comfortable on the court in the last week or two, putting up double figures in two of the last three games.

The updates weren’t all positive, though, as is the case with Jaxson Robinson and Amari Williams.

Robinson, who has been dealing with a wrist injury on his shooting hand, played just 12 minutes against Oklahoma before putting his warmups back on and icing his wrist. He came out “not quite so good,” from the game said Pope. It’s possible, if not likely, that Robinson is out for the Auburn game. It’s not worth him to

Finally, there is Amari Williams. The potential All-SEC big suffered a minor ankle roll in the opening minutes against Oklahoma, but went on to finish the game and played 19 minutes. Pope’s update on him was not quite positive or negative, but neutral.

“Amari seems like he had a decent day yesterday [Thursday], we’ll know more about him today [Friday],” he said.

As the Cats look to see where they stand against the no. 1 ranked team in the country, Pope isn’t making any excuses.

The initial availability report will come out around 8:00 EST on Friday.

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.