MILWAUKEE—Last April, Mark Pope set out on what he described as a “terrifying process” to rebuild the Kentucky Wildcats program from scratch.
He inherited no scholarship players, the expectations of a program that expects championships and the weight of getting Kentucky’s swagger back after a slew of March collapses. The transfer portal wasn’t short of options, but this type of one-season flip was largely unprecedented … especially at one of the sport’s bluebloods. Where to even begin?
How about the biggest winner in college basketball?
There were splashier targets out there than Lamont Butler, the savvy San Diego State Aztecs point guard most famous for his pull-up buzzer-beater against the FAU Owls in the 2023 Final Four. Despite that highlight, Butler’s offensive game hadn’t been much to write home about in his four years at SDSU, known instead for his elite defense and leadership. He wasn’t likely to be Kentucky’s leading scorer (he wasn’t even in the top two at San Diego State), but he was the type of player coaches regularly spend sleepless nights worrying about playing against. Among those coaches: Pope, who had coached against him four straight years as the BYU Cougars coach.
“Every time we played against San Diego State, we spent the first 48 hours trying to figure out how we were going to let him not take our ball on every single possession. I lost so much sleep on that,” Pope said in December.
Pope was determined to not miss out on a player like that, one he’d later call “the foundation” of Kentucky’s program. And Sunday’s 84-75 win over the Illinois Fighting Illini, which locked up Kentucky’s first trip to the NCAA tournament’s second weekend since 2019, demonstrated yet again why Butler was such a must-have.
Butler took just five shots, but his impact on the game was immense. He set the tone defensively, locking up likely NBA draft lottery pick Kasparas Jakucionis and disrupting the flow of an Illinois offense that turned the ball over eight times in the first 12 minutes and rarely looked comfortable. He set the table for others with five assists, including the dish for a momentum-swinging three late in the first half. And down the stretch, he made the perfect Lamont Butler play, swooping in from out of nowhere to swipe the ball from Jakucionis and set up a Brandon Garrison and-one when Illinois was making a last-ditch attempt to make it a game.
HUGE steal and dime from Lamont Butler leads to the Garrison and-one 🔥@KentuckyMBB looking to close it out 👀#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/pUVRoyxIZf
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 23, 2025
“He’s got a knack for it, that’s what he does,” forward Andrew Carr says.
Butler’s doing all this with essentially one arm, with his left shoulder heavily wrapped and not near 100% after injuring the arm in mid-January and re-aggravating it multiple times since. But the man his teammates have taken to calling “LaMarch” wasn’t going to miss these games as long as the arm was still attached to the rest of his body. This was Butler’s 13th career NCAA tournament game and 12th start. Only the UConn Huskies’ Alex Karaban has more tourney starts nationally, and Butler will match Karaban’s appearance total in his Sweet 16 game this week. Butler’s built for these March moments, and his experience in this setting has been a massive boost to this new-look Kentucky team that largely lacks experience playing late into March.
“He’s a winner,” Pope said Sunday. “We said it since Day 1, guys, we were really blessed to have a winner walk through our doors at the University of Kentucky that cares about winning. And we talked about this yesterday, somewhere. I don’t know if I’ve ever coached a player that is more desperate to—I don’t want to say the negative, but I don’t know how—to not let down his team.”
Pope’s other transfer portal evaluations all delivered Sunday. Guard Otega Oweh had an explosive second half after struggling with early foul trouble and finished with 15 points. Koby Brea posted one of his finest games in a Kentucky uniform, with 23 points headlined by a massive second-half flurry that got the Wildcats the separation they needed. Drexel Dragons transfer Amari Williams was excellent around the rim and led the Wildcats in rebounds, assists and blocks. It was the perfect encapsulation of Pope’s roster-building master class this past spring, acing one of the most daunting tests faced by any coach in college basketball in the offseason.
“The terrifying part is that you have zero players on your roster and you’re expected to go win huge, right?” Pope said Saturday, describing the scrambled rebuild. “The exciting part is that you get to start from scratch and kind of really hand-select every single piece to try and fit together, and so there’s no—you’re not forcing any square pegs into round holes.”
Those pieces all came together a lot faster than even the most optimistic observers could have hoped for, with a win over Duke in the second week of the season setting the tone for what has been a special season in Lexington, Ky. But Pope’s tenure, like that of all Kentucky coaches, was always going to be defined by NCAA tournament success. It was the one major hole on his résumé when athletic director Mitch Barnhart pulled the trigger on hiring the former Wildcat player, with Pope lacking any NCAA tournament wins in his nine-year head coaching career prior to taking the job. And at least externally, the pressure had to be amped up even a bit more once their former coach, John Calipari, slayed his own March demons and advanced to the second weekend with the Arkansas Razorbacks.
His handpicked point guard by his side, Pope and the Wildcats delivered. Every rebuild needs a point guard just like Butler, the on- and off-court tone-setter who now gets the chance to lead Big Blue Nation back to where it belongs. Nobody does more for Kentucky (or maybe for anyone in the field) to contribute to winning than Lamont Butler. His teammates? They’re just along for the ride.
“It’s ‘LaMarch,’ man,” Oweh, in his first NCAA tournament, said. “He’s our guy. He’s there to be that guy. He’s going to go out there, play hard, and we just follow what he does.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Lamont Butler Delivers for Mark Pope, Sending Kentucky to Sweet 16.
