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Louisville men’s basketball team had a historically awful season during the 2022-23 campaign under first-year head coach Kenny Payne, and the skipper hasn’t exactly inspired a ton of confidence based on his strange decision to call out a player who didn’t record a single minute in a brutal exhibition loss to a virtually unknown program.
Kenny Payne played for Louisville in the late 1980s before taking his talents to the NBA, and while he’d never served as a head coach before the Cardinals hired him in the spring of 2022, they were hoping his time as an assistant with the Knicks and a couple of college basketball programs would be enough to prepare him for the role.
Unfortunately, that did not turn out to be the case.
Louisville posted an abysmal 4-28 record during Payne’s inaugural season, and while it opted to give him another chance, it’s hard to imagine the team is going to fare much better this year based on what we’ve seen so far.
On Monday night, the Cardinals hosted Kentucky Wesleyan in Louisville and fell to the DII Panthers by a score of 71-68. While it was technically a meaningless preseason showdown, it didn’t exactly inspire a ton of confidence with a week to go before the start of the actual season—especially when you consider what Payne had to say after the game.
According to Sports Illustrated, the coach directed some pointed criticism at some of his older players for failing to hold their own on the boards, saying:
“I need my veteran guys —JJ [Traynor], Emmanuel [Okorafor], Brandon [Huntley-Hatfield]—you can’t finish a game with two rebounds and one rebound. You can’t, you can’t, not and have us have success as a team.”
Huntley-Hatfield was only able to grab a couple of rebounds during his 26 minutes on the floor while Traynor snagged a single one in 16 minutes of play, so it’s fairly easy to understand why Payne called them out.
However, as Nick Sorrell notes, it’s a bit hard to criticize Okorafor for his failure to contribute when you consider he didn’t play a single second while riding the bench for the entirety of the contest.
You could argue Payne was simply discussing his overall philosophy for the season, but at this point, it’s a bit hard to give him the benefit of the doubt. There’s always a chance he’ll prove the doubters wrong—just like there’s a chance the Earth could be consumed by a black hole at some point in the 24 hours.