Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Kyle Wiltjer could end up staying at Kentucky, redshirting

Kyle Wiltjer, Mike McFadden

Kyle Wiltjer’s ready to go (AP Photo)

AP

Kyle Wiltjer doesn’t want to leave Kentucky, it seems.

The 6-foot-9 forward received a release last month to look into transferring and has already taken a visit to Gonzaga to check out the facilities and the program.

But just because Wiltjer is doing his due diligence and looking into his options doesn’t mean that he’s made the decision to leave Lexington. His father told the Portland Tribune that Kyle’s “not 100 percent committed to transferring”.

“Kyle is midway through the college process,” Greg Wiltjer told Kerry Eggers. “The reason he chose Kentucky was a chance to win a national championship, play with the best players in the nation and be in position to have an opportunity to play beyond college. Now he’s looking at what lies in front of him.

“Kyle has a great relationship with Calipari, but he’s not a stereotypical Calipari player. If he were at Duke or some other place, they’d be running him off screens, but that’s not the Kentucky system. And now he has all these thoroughbreds coming in. Kyle’s biggest challenge is his body. He needs to get stronger and quicker, to get help with nutrition, strength and agility.”

If Wiltjer does decide to return to Kentucky, it looks like he may end up redshirting, which could end up being the best possibility for him in the long run. The bottom line is that he’s not going to be getting minutes with Kentucky this season. I don’t care how well he can shoot, a slow-footed power forward that’s too slow to defend on the perimeter and too weak to defend in the post isn’t going to play when Coach Cal has Julius Randle, Willie Cauley-Stein, Alex Poythress, Marcus Lee and Dakari Johnson at his disposal. He just won’t.

Wiltjer needs to spend a season getting stronger, getting quicker, improving his footwork, developing some kind of post-game even if he relies strictly on face-up moves and quick cuts to the rim.

Essentially, Wiltjer needs to do exactly what Kelly Olynyk did for the Zags last season. Whether that happens in Gonzaga or in Kentucky probably doesn’t matter, but the bottom line is that is what has to occur is Wiltjer is ever going to live up to the hype he had coming out of high school.

You can find Rob on twitter @RobDauster.