Kyle Wiltjer has been a top-12 prospect and a McDonald's All-American in a recruiting class that saw him ranked ahead of guys like Michael Carter-Williams and Cody Zeller. He's been a college teammate of Anthony Davis, and a contributor on one of the most dominant national champions in recent memory. He's been a star and a double-digit scorer on the only disappointing Kentucky team of the John Calipari era, and now the leading scorer of a once-beaten Gonzaga team looking to earn a No. 1 seed and its first trip to the Final Four.
Kyle Wiltjer is having one of the most fascinating college basketball careers ever
From winning a national championship alongside Anthony Davis to being the leading scorer on a top-five Gonzaga team, Kyle Wiltjer’s college career has seemingly included it all. And he still he has another year to go.
Ed Szczepanski-USA TODAY Sports
Kyle Wiltjer is just a college junior.
There has been an ongoing debate amongst college basketball fans this season, which accurately surmises the atypical nature of both Wiltjer and the program he left behind almost two years ago. The dialogue surrounds the question of whether or not Wiltjer, a senior this season had he chosen to stay in Lexington, would be a key contributor on the current undefeated Kentucky team.
On the surface, it seems ridiculous. Wiltjer will enter this weekend averaging a team-high 17.4 points per game for a third-ranked Gonzaga team that most view as one of the four or five squads with the potential to keep Kentucky from claiming its ninth national championship this April. He’s 6’10, he’s shooting almost 47 percent from beyond the arc, and he just dropped 45 points in a conference road game on Thursday night. This is the résumé of a player who would be a standout on any team, in any season.
Or is it?
College Hoops
Kentucky is well on its way to joining the elite fraternity of “most dominating college basketball teams ever,” even if the Wildcats look nothing like the current card-carrying members. “Dominance” in this sport typically walks hand-in-hand with images of fast-paced, high-scoring teams loaded with players destined to one day light up scoreboards in the NBA. Instead, this UK team barely ranks in the nation’s top-50 in points per game, and at times, looks downright bad on offense. But nobody can score on them. That’s what happens when you play nine McDonald’s All-Americans every night and have five future professionals who are 6’9 or taller defending the post.
Where Wiltjer, a player with one of the more unique skill sets in the country, would fit in with that team is a mystery that will forever remain unsolved ... although it’s safe to assume that he wouldn’t be putting up the numbers he is in Spokane.
Watching Wiltjer during a late-night West Coast conference game is like watching a 40-something former high school basketball star turned father playing a game against his 12-year-old son and friends. He’s bigger than everyone else, he can get his lethal outside shot off with no trouble, he’s got superior natural skills than the other players on the court, but he looks just a step or three slower than the kids, even when he’s beating them to spots and keeping them out of the lane.
Even Wiltjer’s most-shared highlight of the season so far looks like a move that every former basketball-playing dad has pulled on their son in the backyard at some point.
While it’s unclear how Wiltjer’s dominant dad game would be utilized at the NBA factory in Lexington, at Gonzaga he’s one of the centerpieces of what some believe might be the best team in program history. Part of that is because Mark Few is one of the best coaches in the country when it comes to getting the most out of skilled bigs, but another part is that Wiltjer used his redshirt season to both better his game and transform his body.
At Kentucky, Wiltjer was being asked to perform the same workouts as freak athletes like Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Nerlens Noel. The result was a remarkably worn-down lower body that often left Wiltjer both in pain and a step slower than he should have been.
“Everything (at Kentucky) has such a short window,” Gonzaga strength coach Travis Knight recently told Grantland. “Obviously the turnover is much higher than at other places, and the speed at which they play is so high. To get (Wiltjer) functional in that system, he was doing a lot of running. A lot of hard lifting. A lot of following the lead of the other players who were a little more tailor-made for that system.”
Knight spent the bulk of 2013-14 working with Wiltjer on specialized exercises that wouldn’t make him noticeably larger, but which would rebuild his lower half. The result has been a defensive player who is much more capable of keeping his man out of the lane, and an offensive threat who is now more than the pick-and-pop/spot-up shooter he was with the Wildcats.
Thursday night felt like the ultimate cash-in for all the work Wiltjer put in during his redshirt season, an opportunity to showcase his entire newly-procured arsenal. At various points throughout the 40-minute game, Pacific attempted to use a 6'7 small forward (Ilias Theodorou), a 6'8 power forward (Eric Thompson), and a 7'0 center (Gabriel Aguirre) to slow down Gonzaga's leading scorer. The Tigers also tried double teams, triple teams, and multiple zone looks. Nothing worked.
Wiltjer scored in transition, he scored on drives, he scored on a pair of up-and-under moves, he ball-faked and hit baseline jumpers, and he buried 7-of-10 shots from beyond the arc. When the dust settled, 45 points had been scored, the most in the history of the Alex G. Spanos Center, and the most an opponent had ever dropped against Pacific.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Wiltjer’s performance Thursday night was that no one on the Gonzaga side seemed particularly surprised.
“It was like Adam,” Few said, referring to 2006 NABC Player of the Year Adam Morrison. “I’ve seen Kyle do that in practice, it’s not like it’s an out-of-body experience for him.”
What the college hoops world wants from Wiltjer now is to see him do it on the biggest stage against the best teams. In that regard, he’s the perfect representative for his new program, one which has remained in the national discussion since its meet-cute in 1999, but which hasn’t been able to get over the hump and back to a regional final since.
Helping both the face of high-level and Mid Major basketball to their respective promised lands in a single college career would be a story almost too ambitious to conjure up, but then again nothing about Kyle Wiltjer has ever been normal.
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