Louisville Cardinals coach Pat Kelsey can make mark in ACC basketball

The ACC isn’t kind to men’s basketball coaches their first year in the league.

Of the returning 14 coaches, only four took their teams to the NCAATournament in their first season — and two of those were North Carolina’s Hubert Davis and Duke’s Jon Scheyer, who inherited rosters they had a part in coaching as assistants.

Louisville’s Pat Kelsey had no such advantage.

He’ll still be the fifth coach to make it happen in his first year.

“I am unbelievably bullish in this team,” Kelsey said last week at ACC Tipoff in Charlotte, North Carolina. “(We have an) older team, veteran team. (They’re) skilled, savvy, tough, smart. We have all the components that we need.”

Kelsey assembled all those components thanks to coaching in this era with the transfer portal and name, image and likeness making veteran players readily available.

The Cardinals have 12 transfers on the roster, but it’s not even unprecedented this season as John Calipari leaving Kentucky for Arkansas caused him to sign an entire roster from scratch as well as UK’s Mark Pope.

“That’s not gonna happen a lot, and that made the portal even harder, because those guys were in there, you know, some savages in there,” Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said.

It’s not how Kelsey will build it in the future, but it was needed this time after every player from former coach Kenny Payne’s team transferred. Most of the former Cards entered the portal before Kelsey was named as the new head coach.

There were some talented pieces on the roster as confirmed by how many left for major college teams. That includes three — Brandon Huntley-Hatfield (N.C. State), Mike James (N.C. State) and Ty-Laur Johnson (Wake Forest) — who will face U of L at new ACC destinations.

But, boy, did Kelsey need a clean break to properly reboot the program into one that can make the NCAA Tournament.

The past two seasons felt like the darkest time in modern U of L basketball history that was unrelated to an NCAA investigation or sanctions.

Kelsey isn’t burdened with having to reprogram players who got conditioned to losing the past two years under Payne, nor are the players carrying the weight of past failures.

All of these players are his guys.

It can’t be overstated how important that is.

Notre Dame coach Micah Shrewsberry was frank in his assessment of how tough it was to meld players into a cohesive bunch from former coach Mike Brey’s last team, freshmen whom Shrewsberry recruited to play in the Big Ten at Penn State and the players he got from the portal.

“I think they all were each trying to prove different things, all at the same time,” said Shrewsberry, who finished 7-13 in the ACC last season, which tied for 12th. “It took us a while to try and get everybody on the same page.”

Kelsey has a head start on that, thanks in part to the Cards’ trip in July to play in the Bahamas. It allowed the team 10 full practices and to play against an actual opponent, even though the competition level wasn’t on par with what they’ll see this season.

There will be growing pains for sure as Kelsey and the Cards get in game situations that they’ve never experienced collectively as a team. But this team has the maturity to deal with it as they have played the most minutes in Division I since the program began keeping the stat in 1977.

Kelsey likes to reference the experience of his players as “the back of the bubble gum card,” and the accomplishments they have are not child’s play.

That starts with Wisconsin transfer Chucky Hepburn, who twice played in the NCAA Tournament including as a 3-seed in 2022. Hepburn has an expectation of making the tournament and brought that attitude with him to Louisville.

Hepburn said it’s not just him, but the rest of the team is all asking the same questions.

“How are we going to make it to the national championship? How are we going to get Louisville basketball back?” Hepburn said. “That's what I love about this team. We're concerned about the right things, and that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring Louisville basketball back.”

Aside from Duke and North Carolina, which likely will be picked to finish in the top two spots when the preseason ACC poll is released, the league has no pecking order, no well-established squads that the Cards have to overcome.

Kelsey can make his mark in conference from the start. And he doesn't need a silver spoon to do it.

Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at [email protected], follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter at profile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his columns.