What Will Kenny Payne's Style of Play be at Louisville?

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - We are still roughly five months away from the start of the college basketball season, and for many Louisville fans, the return of hoops can't get here fast enough.

Ever since the university hired Kenny Payne to be the next head coach of the Cardinals, it has generated a buzz around the program that hasn't been seen in quite some time, and throngs of fans are eager to get back to the KFC Yum! Center and watch them play.

But the exact brand of basketball they will be watching has remained a large question ever since his hiring. This will be Payne's first job as a head coach, and save for a couple games that he stepped in for John Calipari while an assistant at Kentucky, he has never had an opportunity to demonstrate his coaching style.

Payne briefly touched upon this subject at his introductory press conference back in mid-March, saying that doesn't want to be overly controlling and get his players to "play with structure." When he spoke to season ticket holders on Monday night as part of a Q&A, and was subsequently asked about his style of play, he expanded on his original answer.

“First of all, I think in order to win games, you got to be a great defensive team, and I want to be a great defensive team," he said. "I want to be long across the board. I want to be able to switch bigs that can guard guards, guards that can guard bigs, and create havoc on the court. Then I want to be able to get out and run in transition and get quick hitters.

"But in order to do that, I have to be able to teach kids how to play. I’ve got to be able to put them in situations where they can read and react, and trust their instincts on the basketball court without being robots. When you're a robot, the other team knows every play you're running, the scores are in the 50's and 60's, and they can predict what you’re going to run. With the scouting today, it's just so hard."

Given what Louisville fans were used to watching during the Denny Crum and Rick Pitino years, getting back to a defensive-minded approach should be music to Louisville fans' ears. But before Payne and his staff can even implement this style, they have to fully flush out the roster.

As of June 15, the Cardinals only have nine scholarship players on their roster for the upcoming 2022-23 season, and only one true guard in El Ellis. For the time being, Louisville has spent little time implementing any aspect of Payne's system, and have been more so focused on conditioning.

"So far, the system is 'work hard,' and that's it," assistant coach Josh Jamieson said. "For the guys that are returning here, most of the time, they've hit that. Coach Payne asks them if they won the workout, or the workout beat them, and we're trying to get the percentage of them beating the workout up."

Time will tell what a Kenny Payne-coached Louisville team will actually look like, and it's very possible that he will have to retool his approach on a year-to-year basis due to changing personnel. But the two biggest principles of Payne's basketball philosophy seem to be: play with a suffocating defense-first approach, and increase offensive basketball IQ to the point where the team is not wholly reliant on orders from the bench.

"If you can play free flowing, unpredictable basketball, and have some principles to it, you're going to keep the defense off-balance. That's how I want to play," Payne said. "I want to be fast. I want to be athletic. I want to play with freedom. I want to shoot the three, but I don't want to live by the three."

(Photo of Kenny Payne: Scott Utterback - Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK)

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