Isaac Trotter just called Milan Momcilovic the best shooter in college basketball, ranked him the No. 2 most impactful transfer in the country, and then left him off every single Preseason All-American team. That is not caution. That is a math error dressed up as scouting.
Momcilovic led the entire NCAA last season in threes made (136) and three-point percentage (48.7 percent) on 7.5 attempts per night while dropping 16.9 points for Iowa State. He was the first player to lead the country in both categories in the same year. ESPN slotted him No. 1 in the portal. Kentucky paid north of $6 million in NIL to get him. And somehow he is not one of the 15 best players on a CBS ballot that pretends to set the table for 2026-27. I keep running the same possession in my head: a 6-foot-8 wing who shoots 48.7 percent from deep on high volume is gravity, and gravity is winning. Pretending otherwise is how you underrate spacing until March makes you look silly.
The Ballot Contradicts the Scout
Trotter’s own piece does the damage for me. He labels Momcilovic the best shooter in the sport and the second-most important transfer behind only Flory Bidunga, then builds three All-American teams without him. You cannot hold both ideas at once. Either the shooting is that rare, in which case it belongs on the third team at absolute minimum, or the “impact” ranking is empty copy. I side with the numbers. Last year Momcilovic hit eight threes in a game four separate times, went for 20-plus in 15 games, and still managed a 50.6 percent clip from the field overall. That is not a specialist hiding in a vacuum. That is a primary scorer who happens to break defenses from 25 feet.
The easy counter is usage. Kentucky will have more mouths to feed than a defensive-minded Iowa State team that funneled everything through him. Fine. Mark Pope did not spend blue-blood capital and a top-of-market NIL deal so Momcilovic could stand in the corner and watch. Pope’s pitch was explicit. Momcilovic said it himself after arriving: “When (Pope) recruited me, his pitch was (that) he loves playing with shooters, so I felt like this offensive system was good for me, and we wrapped it up from there.” That is scheme fit, not vibes. Pope’s offense lives on floor spacing and decision speed. A 48.7 percent shooter on 7.5 attempts does not lose value because Otega Oweh or whoever else is also open. He multiplies them.
The other knock floating around is the supporting box score: 3.1 rebounds, 1.0 assists. True. Those numbers have to climb if he wants the award in March. I am not handing him first-team hardware in July for zero playmaking. But All-American teams are not defensive-rebounding contests. They are about how much a player tilts the floor. Momcilovic tilted it enough to help Iowa State to the tournament three straight years, two Sweet 16s, and a 20-point dagger against Kentucky itself in the 2026 second round. The “he only shoots” critique is the same lazy frame that undervalued every high-volume floor-spacer until the analytics caught up.
Pope’s System Turns Pure Shooting Into Offense Creation
Watch the early Lexington work and the role is already clear. Momcilovic told the Herald-Leader he spent the first week mostly learning actions, then started finding where he fits once five-on-five ramped up: “I think you have to understand their strengths on how they see the game and what they’re really good at, and then you just got to play off it.” That is a three-year college vet talking, not a portal tourist chasing a bag. He also made the fit question the center of his recruitment: “How can I fit in with this team? Are the guys around me going to be real good?” Those are the right questions. The answers in Pope’s system are yes, and the threes will come in bunches because the offense is built to create them.
I have seen this movie. Elite catch-and-shoot gravity gets treated like a luxury until it becomes the reason a team cannot be helped off the perimeter. Momcilovic is not asking to run the offense. He is asking defenses to choose between leaving him alone at 48.7 percent or rotating and giving everyone else downhill seams. That choice is worth more than another 3-and-D wing who averages 4 rebounds and 2 assists while shooting 34 percent from deep. The national media still prices the latter higher because the box score looks “complete.” It is not. Efficiency at volume from three is the rarest skill in the sport, and Momcilovic just posted the cleanest version of it in the country.
Kentucky did not bring him in to be the 16th-best player on a preseason list. They brought him in because a historic shooting season in Rupp changes how every SEC defense has to guard the first action. He said it without decoration when he got to campus: he is going to bring “a lot of three point makes to the court.” That is the entire job description, and last year’s tape says he will crush it.
Leave him off your All-American teams in July if you want. Just do not act surprised in February when the same voter is scrambling to invent a narrative about how nobody saw the leap coming. The leap is already on film. The disrespect is just refusing to watch it.
