Tuesday Headlines: Building Mark Pope’s First Kentucky Basketball Roster

Monday’s basketball-related news was rather unpleasant for Kentucky.

Boogie Fland re-opened his recruitment, Aaron Bradshaw transferred to Ohio State, Zvonimir Ivisic transferred to Arkansas, D.J. Wagner entered the transfer portal and Ugonna Onyenso declared for the NBA Draft.

The bad news here is Kentucky could very well end up losing Fland for good, which would really hurt the team’s recruiting class for this fall.

It’s also not the greatest result that Bradshaw, Ivisic, Onyenso and Wagner (assuming he doesn’t return to Kentucky) all four will be off the roster. While the four didn’t really amount to much last season, they were being looked at for significant growth in year two at UK.

This also puts the heat on new head coach Mark Pope a bit since he’s having to work twice as hard to complete his staff but also work some magic in the transfer portal.

If — and it’s a very large if — Reed Sheppard comes back, the Wildcats will have two Kentucky Mr. Basketball winners in their backcourt with he and incoming freshman Travis Perry.

There’s also the slim possibility Adou Thiero makes his return to Lexington.

Former BYU big man Aly Khalifa is expected to make his transfer decision soon while Drexel Dragons forward Amari Williams will meet with Pope in the next week.

Kentucky also has their eye on Oklahoma State Cowboys guard Javon Small, TCU big man JaKobe Coles, Northern Illinois Huskies guard David Coit and Dayton Flyers guard Koby Brea.

David Cobb with CBS Sports listed the country’s top-60 players in the transfer portal, with some of these sounding like perfect fits for the Pope system.

There’s a lot of work to be done, but Pope clearly has the passion to bring Kentucky back to the promise land and fans have to absolutely love that.