Himmelsbach | NBA draft night always special for Calipari

BROOKLYN, N.Y.

About an hour before Thursday night's NBA draft, the 20 players who had been invited to the Barclays Center gathered on a stage for a photo opportunity. Staff members lined them up so there were no centers standing in front of guards, and then everyone smiled for the photographers who were snapping away a few feet below.

But one man with a camera stood out from the others. University of Kentucky coach John Calipari held up his cellphone and captured pictures of his two latest draft prospects: forwards Julius Randle and James Young.

Calipari was by himself, and he was smiling. You could tell he was genuinely proud, because no one was really taking pictures of him taking pictures. He had no one to put on a front for.

"It is the worst, waiting for things to drop, waiting for people to get drafted," Calipari said before the night began. "It's awful."

But the wait wasn't especially long, because with Kentucky basketball and Calipari, the wait is rarely especially long. Calipari saw Randle get selected by the Los Angeles Lakers with the No. 7 pick and then he saw Young get selected by the Boston Celtics with the 17th choice.

And for many college programs, having multiple players selected in the first round of one draft would be cause for cartwheels, a rare occurrence that signals that their program has arrived. For Kentucky, though, draft night has become a kind of graduation, the logical next step that freshmen begin working toward the moment they arrive on campus.

So having just two players here on this night made it somehow seem like a quiet night for the Wildcats. And that's indicative of where this program stands. The draft has become a UK event, and all signs point toward it staying that way for quite a while.

For many schools, having two draft picks is an aberration because they usually have one or none. For Kentucky, it's an aberration because there will often be more.

At the start of this season, many of us thought this year's draft would be colored in Wildcat blue. But then the season unfolded a bit differently than we all thought it would, a difficult year that was followed by a scintillating run to the national title game.

Then, when players started to declare for the draft, there was unusual silence at UK. A total of eight players probably would have been selected had they left, but in the end, all of them except Young and Randle returned to school.

"It took individuals time to get in great shape and get themselves ready," Calipari said on Thursday. "And they all felt that they needed another year."

In a strange way, for UK this draft felt just as notable for the players who were not here as it did for those who were. While Randle and Young reveled in the fact that they joined perhaps the two most iconic franchises in basketball history, it's impossible not to think about what is still lurking in Lexington.

There's Willie Cauley-Stein and Dakari Johnson. There's Alex Poythress and Marcus Lee. There's Andrew and Aaron Harrison. And that doesn't even include yet another star-studded freshman class.

For many of them, their days will come here at the draft. But for now they are still Wildcats. Calipari is thinking about it, too.

"I'm not going to force guys out the door," he said. "But it's a pretty nice feeling knowing that we have a bunch of the guys coming back and a bunch of what we call veterans; sophomores are veterans for us."

Adam Himmelsbach can be reached at 502-582-4372 by email ahimmelsbach@ courier-journal.com and on Twitter @adamhimmelsbach