In the second round of the 2026 NCAA Tournament, Milan Momcilovic finished off Mark Pope’s second season as Kentucky’s men’s basketball coach, scoring 20 points in Iowa State’s 82-63 rout of a once-ballyhooed Wildcats team.

Two months later, he may have just saved Pope’s job.

One of the final moves of the 2026 transfer portal cycle was arguably the most seismic, with Momcilovic, the No. 1 player in USA TODAY Sports’ portal rankings, committing to Kentucky five days after he pulled out of the 2026 NBA Draft.

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On its own, Momcilovic’s decision is enormous. 

Last season, on his way to earning second-team All-Big 12 honors for a 29-win Iowa State team that made the Sweet 16, the 6-foot-8 forward was perhaps the best shooter in the country. He led the country in made 3-pointers (136) and averaged 7.5 attempts from beyond the arc per game. Despite that high volume, he was still incredibly efficient, making 48.7% of his 3s. As Kyle Tucker of 247Sports pointed out, Momcilovic is the only Division I player since the 3-point line was introduced in 1986 to make at least 130 3s in a season while shooting at a 48% clip or better.

Given what Pope had endured in the preceding weeks and months, the addition of Momcilovic meant that much more.

After a laudable debut season in 2024-25, Pope’s second Kentucky team fell drastically short of immense expectations. An ill-conceived roster reportedly worth more than $20 million finished ninth in the SEC, lost 14 games, needed a miracle, last-second heave to avoid a first-round NCAA tournament loss to Santa Clara and was punked in the second round by an Iowa State team down its best player, with one Cyclones player saying after the game that they knew the Wildcats would quit if they got down by enough at any point.

An offseason that initially carried the promise of a fresh start quickly turned into a recurring nightmare. 

Kentucky brought several of the biggest names available in the portal to campus and was well-positioned to land them only to ultimately be rebuffed. There was Rob Wright III, who announced he was going back to BYU the day after wrapping up a visit to Lexington. Syracuse transfer Donnie Freeman had long been viewed as a virtual lock for Pope until he reversed course and committed to St. John’s and Rick Pitino. The portal whiffs hardly ended there, with players like Jeremiah Wilkinson, Dink Pate, Dedan Thomas Jr. and Cruz Davis either visiting the Wildcats or being in close contact with them only to end up elsewhere. On the high-school front, Tyran Stokes, a Kentucky native who is the No. 1 recruit in the 2026 class, received a full-court press from the Wildcats before going before millions of viewers on “Inside the NBA” to announce he was headed to Kansas.

A coach who had been greeted back at his alma mater two years earlier by thousands of fans who packed into Rupp Arena for something as banal as an introductory news conference was suddenly staring at the very real possibility that if an underwhelming roster didn’t overachieve in 2026-27, he could soon be out of a job.

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Then, much like the Otega Oweh 32-foot 3 that tied Santa Clara at the buzzer back in March, a prayer was answered. And with it, the outlook for Pope and his team next season changes considerably.

From a transactional sense, the slew of recruiting misses earlier in the cycle put Kentucky in an excellent position to land Momcilovic, with one of the most well-resourced programs in the sport having that more money to shell out for a player several other marquee brands were also pursuing. The fact that one of those other suitors was archrival Louisville, which had won a handful of recruiting battles against Pope this offseason and would have become a bona fide national title threat with Momcilovic in the fold, only makes it sweeter for the Wildcats.

With Momcilovic on board, what looked like an impotent Kentucky roster a week ago is suddenly much more intriguing. Center Malachi Moreno, a five-star recruit in the 2025 class, is poised for a breakout sophomore season after forestalling the NBA himself. As only a freshman, Alex Wilkins was one of the best mid-major guards in the country last season and should only continue to blossom. Zoom Diallo’s an ostensibly odd fit for Pope’s 3-point-centric offense, but he’s a dynamic lead guard who should be able to make plays. Forward Justin McBride and guard Jerone Morton are nice depth pieces.

What that group was desperately missing was a star, a reliable bucket-getter who the rest of the roster could be built around. In Momcilovic, it got just that.

Despite the hefty price tag he came with — he reportedly earned a deal worth more than $6 million — Momcilovic doesn’t instantly transform Kentucky from an also-ran into a national title contender, at least on paper. The Wisconsin native, who didn’t make the 10-player All-Big 12 first team in 2026, likely takes his new team from outside of various preseason top 25s to somewhere near the bottom end of the top 20.

If nothing else, though, he gives his new coach some sorely needed breathing room with a rabid fan base with justifiably lofty expectations for their beloved program. The team Pope had constructed before the NBA draft decision deadline had a relatively low ceiling, both in its conference and in the broader national landscape. With him, the Wildcats have a chance, whether it’s to compete with the best teams in the SEC, advance to the second weekend of the tournament or maybe even dream of a run to Detroit for the Final Four come next April.

For their coach, who had just suffered through the most tumultuous stretch of his brief tenure, that’s more than enough for now.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY Sports: Why Milan Momcilovic is more than just a top-ranked transfer for Kentucky basketball