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Pat Kelsey has already accomplished something special at Louisville … and he’s just getting started
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Louisville has enjoyed its share of milestone accomplishments in its rich basketball history, including 3 national championships.
Two of which the NCAA recognizes.
So in the grand scheme of things, Tuesday night’s 85-61 win at Syracuse wasn’t cause for celebration.
No nets came down. No trophies were awarded.
But in the context of the here and now, the otherwise routine victory represented an important step forward in the trajectory of a once-proud program that had fallen into disarray.
Now 13-5 in their first season under coach Pat Kelsey, the Cardinals surpassed their win total from the past 2 years combined during the forgettable tenure of Kelsey’s predecessor Kenny Payne.
Start engraving his name on that ACC Coach of the Year plaque.
No matter what happens the rest of the way, even in the likelihood of Jon Scheyer and Duke going 20-0 in the ACC, no one will have done a better job than the man who has cleaned up the mess he inherited with the speed and efficiency of a HAZMAT team.
Kelsey has done more than just return Louisville to respectability. With 7 consecutive wins, a 6-1 conference record and all 5 of its losses coming against ranked opponents, a legitimate case can be made for Louisville being the 2nd-best team in the ACC – at least right now – behind only the No. 3-ranked Blue Devils — the only ACC team in this week’s Top 25.
That in itself is worthy of recognition.
The job Kelsey has done is even more remarkable considering the adversity he’s had to overcome.
We’re not talking about retooling a roster that had only 1 returning player when he arrived from College of Charleston last spring.
That was hard enough.
Even after building a team from scratch with 12 transfers and spending time molding all those new pieces into a cohesive unit, an early injury epidemic forced Kelsey to change directions and reinvent things on the fly.
“One of the fun things, to me, about coaching is figuring it out,” Kelsey said Monday on the ACC’s weekly coaches conference call. “Good things happen. Bad things happen. It’s helping your team get on to the next thing and respond the right way.
“Sometimes it’s how you respond to success, which is what we’re dealing with right now. Then it’s some adversity too. There’s no question that we dealt with some really tough things, with injuries to some really key guys that made us kind of go back to the drawing board a little bit.”
After getting smacked in the mouth, both physically and figuratively, by Tennessee in their second game together, the original version of Kelsey’s Cardinals showed how potent they could be by putting on an offensive and defensive clinic in an 89-61 thrashing of then 14th-ranked Indiana at the Battle 4 Atlantis.
But the mood quickly shifted from euphoria to dread when just 48 hours later, dynamic big man Kasean Pryor suffered a season-ending knee injury in a close loss to Oklahoma.
The 6-10 South Florida transfer, whose ability to run the floor and knock down 3-pointers made him the perfect fit for Kelsey’s aggressive, up-tempo style, was averaging 12 points, 6 rebounds and 2 assists per game when he was lost.
His absence, combined with previous injuries to fellow big Aly Khalifa, forward Aboubacar Traore and guard Koren Johnson, left the Cardinals shorthanded and shorter than expected, and sent Louisville into a tailspin that saw it lose 3 of the next 4.
That’s when Kelsey and his team regrouped, slowed things down and began attacking opponents from long range. Louisville’s 557 3-point attempts are 80 more than anyone else in the ACC this season, and its average of 30.9 per game ranks 10th nationally.
Although the Cardinals don’t convert an especially high percentage of those shots, they hit enough – with Indiana transfer Chucky Hepburn and College of Charleston expat Reyne Smith doing the bulk of the heavy lifting – to make the strategy work.
“It took a little bit for it to get our footing back and to figure out our new way,” Kelsey said. “But I really feel like our guys adapted well and we have some good momentum going right now.”
It’s a wave, fueled by Kelsey’s intensity and the fire he’s lit beneath a dormant fan base, that has carried Louisville all the way to No. 28 in the NET rankings heading into Saturday’s home game against Virginia and has the Cardinals on the fast track toward their first NCAA Tournament bid since 2019.
Getting there wouldn’t be a huge surprise considering Kelsey’s resume, which includes 2 tournament appearances each with Charleston and Winthrop. But doing it in Year 1, given the obstacles he’s had to overcome before and during the season?
Now that would be an accomplishment.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
