kentucky.com

After three seasons at John Calipari’s side, Adou Thiero is ready for the NBA

Three years ago, it was a dream. But the general consensus said it was an unlikely one.

Adou Thiero didn’t even have his own profile page — let alone a national ranking — on some of the most prominent basketball recruiting sites when John Calipari took a flier on the late-blooming high school prospect from his native Pittsburgh.

At that point, Thiero was an afterthought addition to Kentucky’s roster for the 2022-23 season. There were no immediate expectations for a player who was still 17 years old when he committed to the Cats at the very end of his senior year of high school.

His complete lack of a national recruiting reputation indicated the long-term prospects of him playing in the pros weren’t great either.

Yet on Wednesday afternoon, there Thiero sat, his name on a table at the NBA Combine in Chicago, where he’d already met with decision-makers from five different teams by lunchtime.

The former Kentucky player ran down the list of teams he’d had discussions with that morning — the Brooklyn Nets, Houston Rockets, Milwaukee Bucks, New York Knicks and Sacramento Kings — so many meetings in such a short amount of time that he struggled to remember all of them off the top of his head.

Sounds exhausting.

“It was,” Thiero acknowledged. “It was an early morning. But, you know, we look forward to things like these. It’s not a bad thing.”

Not bad at all for a guy who just turned 21 years old last week and seems right on the verge of actually living out that NBA dream.

Following the league’s draft lottery Monday night — a process that set the order of picks in the 2025 NBA draft — prominent basketball analysts updated their big boards for this year.

Thiero, after three seasons of college, might just end up as a first-round pick.

ESPN’s latest mock draft has the 6-foot-8 wing going with the No. 30 overall selection — the final pick of the first round — to the Los Angeles Clippers.

The new mock drafts from Yahoo Sports and Bleacher Report projected Thiero at No. 32 overall to the Boston Celtics — last year’s NBA champions — and The Athletic had him going No. 38 to the San Antonio Spurs, a proud franchise with a great core of younger players.

Safe to say, Thiero will hear his name called during this year’s NBA draft.

“I’m just thankful. Just blessed for the whole journey,” he said in an interview with the Herald-Leader. “I’m just grateful, really, you know, for everybody who’s been part of my life, helping me get to this moment and just going through everything. Everyone who’s believed in me. I’m very thankful for all of it.

“It’s great to go through this experience and realize all the hard work at the end of the day is paying off right now.”

Of course, that journey, from a college basketball perspective, began three years ago in Lexington.

From Kentucky to the NBA

Thiero got on the floor sparingly as a Kentucky freshman — showing signs of his elite athleticism and energetic play at times — before emerging as a key player for the Wildcats as a sophomore.

He actually entered the NCAA transfer portal before Calipari departed UK for Arkansas last spring, yet he ended up reuniting with his old coach at the end of that process.

That reunion worked out for both sides.

Calipari found additional continuity for his first season in Fayetteville — with Thiero joining former UK teammates D.J. Wagner and Zvonimir Ivisic there — and Thiero ended up being arguably the most important player on Razorbacks’ 2024-25 roster.

He averaged 15.1 points and 5.8 rebounds per game, shooting 54.5% from the field — a jump in overall efficiency — and flashing more scoring ability than he ever had at Kentucky.

One of his best games of the season came at his old team’s expense. Thiero tallied 21 points and eight rebounds — and went 10 of 12 on free throws — in his return to Rupp Arena, an 89-79 upset win for the Razorbacks amid a bizarre scene surrounding Calipari’s return.

“It was definitely a great game,” Thiero said, reflecting on that night. “Just going back looking at it, energy wise — Kentucky getting the lead early, us having to fight back against, you know, a loud Rupp Arena. It was definitely something to go through, and not many are going to be able to experience that.

“There were times I was in there and I could hear my own heartbeat over everything. It was just surreal. But you work out, you do everything you do for moments like those. And that’s a game that’s gonna be remembered.”

That was one performance among many impressive nights — he scored at least 20 points in eight of his 26 regular-season games — but his junior year basically ended before the postseason began, with Thiero suffering a knee injury against Missouri on Feb. 22.

He returned to the court in Arkansas’ overtime loss to Texas Tech in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament more than a month later, but he was able to log only five minutes that night due to the injury.

It was a disappointing end to his college career — if, in fact, that was his final appearance — after also suffering an injury and playing just seven minutes in UK’s shocking March Madness loss to Oakland last year. He played a total of three minutes — and didn’t attempt a shot — in Kentucky’s NCAA Tournament games against Providence and Kansas State as a freshman.

“It definitely hurt,” he said of missed opportunities to make an NCAA Tournament impact. “But I was just trying to stay positive. My circle around me just kept telling me, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Just believing what God has planned for you — that’s just what I’ve been going with the whole time.”

Adou Thiero’s draft outlook

Technically, there’s still a chance Thiero could return to Arkansas for his senior year. That sounds far from likely, however.

“The door is not completely shut,” he said of the possibility he could go back to college. “We should know more after this week. … I mean, for me, personally, the door is kind of closed for me. But my circle, they want to hear the right things to finally be able to shut that door.”

Thiero sounded like someone who was planning to stay in the draft, and the general consensus in basketball circles is that he’ll do just that. (ESPN’s preseason Top 25 has Arkansas at No. 10 — one spot ahead of Kentucky — and that projection does not include Thiero.) The draft withdrawal deadline for college players is May 28.

Those flashes that he showed as a UK freshman have developed into consistent enough bursts to put Thiero in the first-round conversation, and that’s a difficult status to achieve.

“I’m a high-motor defender,” Thiero said of his best attribute at this point. “You know, I can change the game with a block or a dunk, a momentum swing just like that. And I feel like that’s hard to teach — a high motor — so (an NBA team would be) getting that out of me right away.

“It was my sophomore year in college (at UK), when I realized that’s how I would get to touch the floor. We had a lot of guys who could already put the ball in the rim, so I decided, ‘Why not make an impact on defense?’ That’s when I was able to pick it up on that end and really expand my defensive game.”

While Thiero made noticeable offensive strides last season, he was still a subpar shooter — 25.6% from 3-point range on 43 attempts — but he’s confident that he can transform that aspect of his game at the next level and said that was his main focus from a developmental standpoint.

He’s also concentrating on getting healthy.

That knee injury that derailed Thiero’s junior season hasn’t fully healed. He hasn’t had any physical workouts for NBA teams yet and did not take part in the games at the Combine this week. “We’re almost there,” he said when asked how close he was getting to a full recovery.

With former Arkansas teammate Boogie Fland pulling out of the NBA draft earlier in the week — and hitting the transfer portal — Thiero remains the only real hope for Calipari to extend his NBA draft streak, which currently sits at 17 consecutive years with a first-round pick.

In their postseason meeting, Calipari passed along some advice to the player he’s coached for the past three seasons.

“He just told me to get in the best shape of my life,” Thiero said. “That’s the most important thing. Because when I’m in the best shape of my life, a lot of people can’t do the things that I do.”