By Les Johns | @KernelJohns

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UK basketball head coach John Calipari is in the beginning stages of assimilating six new players onto the roster of a team looking to defend last year’s national championship.

Calipari met with the media in September to talk about early preparations. This is the second of a two-part series from that interview.

Question: Do you think Nerlens Noel can handle the inevitable comparisons to Anthony Davis?

Calipari: He shouldn’t be compared. They’re totally different — not even the same. Nerlens is going to give us a different type of game. Anthony understood how to compete on possessions. Nerlens is still learning. He’ll take possessions off, and you can’t do that. What he is, is a normal freshman. Everyone forgets where Anthony was early in the year.  He had absolutely no post game. He was shaky shooting free throws until at the end he became a real good free-throw shooter. Physically couldn’t hold his position. He did stuff and looked good, but he came a long way as the year went on. He was able to because the team was so good, it wasn’t totally on his shoulders — he was able to build some self-esteem and confidence as the year went on. That’s what I’m hoping for (Noel). That’s why I like the fact that we do have seven guys that could lead us in scoring, similar to last year.

Q: Which freshman came in most ready to play a game tomorrow?

Calipari: Probably Alex and Archie would be the two. We’ve been working on Archie’s shot. You can’t shoot different kind of balls. You’ve got to shoot consistently. When you’re in high school you can miss your first 12, because you’re getting 12 or 15 more. Now you can’t do that. In his case, you’ve got to be a very consistent shooter. So he’s not ready for that yet. And if he’s going to shoot a lot of balls for us, he better be a consistent shooter. Alex is just the motor. We’ve got to get him to understand how hard on every possession you must play. When we get him there, he will be scary. But right now, we’re going to be behind. That’s just the way it is. Last year we had Doron (Lamb), Terrence (Jones) and Darius (Miller) — they had all been to a Final Four the year before.

Q: It’s been said that a player has to have a certain mentality to play at Kentucky. Does this group of players get what it means to play here?

Calipari: We’ll see. They knew coming in; I know that. It was explained to them very directly in the recruiting process. I think it starts in the recruiting process. We’re not begging kids. We’re recruiting kids and we’re recruiting hard, but we’re telling them the truth. It’s hard here. This is a unique place. The result is that they’re prepared for this stuff that’s happening. Our guys have gone and stepped up, and guys that people never thought would do X, Y, Z are in that league (NBA).

Q: How much does last year’s group and success affect that mindset for the new team?

Calipari: Well, there’s a couple things. One, the academic bar has been raised here, and it’s been raised ever since Brandon Knight came here. They understand that you’ve got a responsibility and if you don’t hold up that responsibility, then it’s hard for us to believe we can count on you. So that has changed.

The other thing that I would tell you is that if you think shots matter, ask Michael Kidd Gilchrist and Anthony Davis, the No. 1 and No. 2 picks in the draft, who got the fourth and fifth-most shots on our team. Ask those two if it mattered. That’s changed now. I think again what they were as a team and how they were their brothers’ keeper gives you an idea. Are you willing to do all that? Are you willing to be the sixth man?

You’re coaching at Kentucky and you understand that this is life and death for some people, but it’s not life and death for me. I told you before: I want to win championships for the state and the commonwealth. The most important thing is helping these young kids. It’s a players-first program. If we do right by them, if we make decisions based on them, they will drag us where we want to go.

It started with those five going in the first round (of the 2010 NBA draft) which is something that’s never done, may never be done again unless we do it here. Now all of the sudden it’s changed what’s happened for us, and now we stay as a players-first (program) and they drag us to this. Let’s see where this team can drag us.

Q: Are you happy with the non-conference schedule?

Calipari: Yeah. I wanted to play that Indiana game. I thought those would be great games in Indianapolis, but that’s fine. We got Baylor. North Carolina’s being added back, and we’ll have Louisville and North Carolina one away, one home every year. You’ll have some neutral games every year. We’re still in the process of the Duke stuff every year where we’ll play at a neutral site. Mike (Krzyzewski) says he wants to do it. And then we’ll play two or three other games, maybe another game here and there depending on our team. What if everybody comes back? Yeah, we may add some single-shot games and play more to prepare the team, but I think we’re doing what most of the teams are doing now. You’re playing a schedule that fits, and you’d like to play more, but that’s for fans and me, but this is about these kids.

Q: What do the two new teams, Missouri and Texas A&M, do for the strength of the SEC?

Calipari: Missouri is picked above us. A&M, they struggled last year, but I think they’re going to be good again. I think they’ll be fine. They slipped a little bit, but I think they’re going to be fine.

Q: Are your batteries recharged enough for you to try to do this again?

Calipari:  Probably when I’m done, in my last year, I’ll run out of gas then. I took some time before the Dominican Republic (coaching the national team) that I’ve never done before. We got back and I took some time. We went to Boston and I was with my daughters, and I took some time. I took some good time this weekend — read about 150 pages of a book I started and kind of kicked back. But I kept coming over to the office. We have two workouts that go about 50 minutes, so if I choose to grab a player and work on his shooting, I can do that. So I had Archie (Goodwin) over here, and we did a little shooting.  So I’m just enjoying it. Listen, the pace you go here is the pace you go. You want to coach here, you take a lot of crap. If that’s what I have to do to be the coach here, then I’ll take a lot of crap. I’m the coach at Kentucky. It took me 20 years to get this job.

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