The Time Is At Hand...

...and I have time on my mind. Perhaps that's due to the annual "fall back" of daylight savings last weekend. Lord knows an extra hour of sleep never hurt anybody. But more likely it's the heated anticipation of the very promising basketball season that lies ahead for us Kentucky fans and followers.

Not coincidentally, one of the more intriguing aspects of this season will rest upon the very concept of time itself. Specifically, playing time.

I would expect that any blue-blooded UK fan is going to have an opinion regarding playing time: Who's starting? Who's the sixth man? Who's buried at the end of the bench? Who should be seeing more of the court?

So consider one of Dan-O's favorite activities-- a little game of boxscore observation that I like to call "adding up the minutes."

The math is simple. A college basketball game runs two, 20-minute halves. (Barring overtime of course.) And with 5 players on the court at all times, that means John Calipari is going to have 200 minutes per game to divvy up amongst his players as he best sees fit.

Personally, I don't think there's any way that Patrick Patterson falls to much less than the 35 minute range. (Note: all estimates disregard the very real possibilities of injury and/or foul trouble. So just buckle up and play along.) Furthermore, Mr. John Wall should be putting in 35 minutes. Every. Single. Night. Basically those two guys figure to have one frontcourt and one backcourt spot on permanent lockdown for the entire season. November through (hopefully) April.

You give those two studs the occasional breather. Maybe you have to pull them for some specific tactical instruction-- again, only occasionally. They are by most accounts two singular talents, All-SEC if not All-American level projections.

Now personally, I think Eric Bledsoe is going to get the most minutes at the other guard spot. He's a freshman, like Wall, and he's going to be raw and learning throughout the season. But probably too good to keep off the floor much. And Sophomore Darius Miller is listed on my roster as a guard as well, although I think of him more as a "three". (He's 6-7/223). But I figure those guys are both good for 25-30 minutes per game in Coach Cal's system, given their skills and potential. In the spirit of this exercise, we will call it 27.5 per game for each of them.

Likewise, I figure the freshman tandem of Cousins and Orton (the poor man's Twin Towers?) are looking at 20-25 minutes a piece on the blocks. Perhaps this is optimistic. Maybe the DDMO won't fit their closer to 7-foot frames, or they have trouble adapting to the college competition. Cal has warned us that he won't be able to "hide" anybody in his system. But again, moving along, I'm going to pencil them each at 22.5 mpg.

Obviously, that's 6 players, and not all of them can start. We'll set that aside since Coach Bolus always said starting is overrated. So looking at my abacus, that would quickly get us to a total of 170 minutes out of Kentucky's 200 total.

Which is where it gets really interesting. You've only got a half hour, a mere sitcom's span of time remaining, to split between Hood/Harrellson/Liggins/Dodson, not to mention the team's two seniors, Ramon Harris and Perry Stevenson. (No offense intended to Mark Krebs.)

But think about it. Jon Hood was only Kentucky's prep Mr. Basketball last year. Dodson had 19 points to lead the team in the Campbellsville exhibition. Harrellson is allegedly shaping up to be a legitimate perimeter shooting threat. Stevenson would start for a LOT of D-1 teams. And so on.

Is it a nice problem to have, trying to split up 200 minutes amongst the available talent? You bet it is. And surely this little parlor game is not going to play out exactly as I've drawn it up.

There will be times where the rotation is overly tight against any given opponent due to matchups. I would also expect there will be blowouts where everybody gets in on the fun. Maybe a player or two comes down with the dreaded swine flu at some point.

Thus there are plenty of alternate scenarios to chew on, and I'm not sure what exactly we will be able to take away from an opponent the likes of Clarion. (Over/under on Patterson jams vs. John Calipari's alma mater: 6.)

We already know Bledsoe is probably out with an ankle injury for Friday night, and we also know that Wall is going to miss the opener vs. Morehead St. Plus, DeAndre Liggins tallied ZERO minutes against Campbellsville, apparently at Cal's discretion entirely-- and Cal has hinted that he is not ruling out further benchings of anyone on the roster, as necessary.

Which leads me to conclude that playing time figures to be a hot topic all the way through to spring time.