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Good morning! It was a relatively quiet news day on Monday. Unless you’re a certain program from the Nutmeg State. We’ll get to that.

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1. Kentucky’s deep, well-paid and title focused

No team is deeper than Kentucky this season. And that’s by design.

Sure, some have rosters loaded with 15 talented players (see headline No. 2 as an example). But it’s easy to make the case that no team has a deeper, wider pool of overall talent than Mark Pope’s Wildcats.

They’ve got one of the game’s most talented point guards (Jaland Lowe), an All-SEC wing and potential SEC POY (Otega Oweh), a national champ combo guard (Denzel Aberdeen), two defensive terrors (Mo Dioubate and Jayden Quaintance), depth up front in Kam Williams and Brandon Garrison, freshmen with potential (Jasper Johnson and Malachi Moreno), plus a couple of sophomore guards who will play whatever role is required to win (Collin Chandler and Trent Noah).

That’s a roster with anywhere from $12-$20 million in NIL deals, depending on your news source. It’s not overwhelming talent, but assembled to provide versatility and depth, which was one of the rare drawbacks of last season’s team.

Is that NIL price tag worth it? Some coaches sound skeptical. But there’s really not much to dislike on the roster, as Rob Dauster and Jeff Goodman noted in our Offseason Grades series.

Even the newest commit, Croatian big man Andrija Jelavic — who’s already doing his part on social media after arriving on campus n Monday — is a player capable of playing multiple positions and presents a solid upside.

Sure, there are questions. Quaintance is still recovering from knee surgery (Pope says he’s on track to play this season, but isn’t committing to a return date). Lowe hit just 26.6% of his shots beyond the arc last season, but Pope said Lowe was the best shooter during five-on-five competition over the summer.

And will the Wildcats play differently with this roster?

Last season, UK ranked 128th in 3-pointers attempted per field goal attempts (41%) and shot 37.5% from deep. That shooting’s not too dissimilar from John Calipari’s last season, but the primary difference in offensive scheme allowed lots of space for driving lanes. That scheme won’t change, but this roster lacks the perimeter shooting of 2024-25. That’ll likely make driving lanes a little clogged.

One would expect this roster to be better defensively. Quaintance is a human eraser (19th in block rate). Dioubate and Garrison are solid rebounders and defenders. The positional length is slightly shorter from last season, but Pope’s team excel at preventing shots at the rim and should thrive on the defensive glass.

In the end, the goal is a national tile. And Pope thinks it’ll be the little things that get them there.

“I felt like as a head coach, I failed our team a little bit in terms of picking and choosing the places where we’re going to have a relentless standard, where anything less than it was going to be successful,” he told Matt Norlander last week. “So one of our big keys going into the season is we’re going to have a standard that we will refuse to accept anything less in some facets of the game that are controllable. I think we’re going to do a much better job with that.”

2. UConn snags 2 (!) international players in one day

Kentucky isn’t the only program loading up with talent and filling its roster limit of 15 players. Dan Hurley seems intent on ensuring UConn has three platoons of players.

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