Mark Pope chased Dedan Thomas Jr. a year ago when the guard was transferring out of UNLV, and Kentucky is reportedly back in the mix now that Thomas has re-entered the portal. The interest comes while Thomas is still recovering from foot surgery and trying to answer the same question that surrounded him before: whether his next stop can finally keep him on the floor.
Thomas, who ultimately chose LSU, is one of the cleaner bets in the portal if he gets back to full strength. His time in Baton Rouge was derailed by a foot injury. He tried to return, hurt it again and was shut down for the year after playing just four games. The surgery was not done until March, and the standard recovery window for that procedure is four to five months, though Thomas Sr. told Sports Illustrated in February that his son would be back in three months.
That timing matters because Kentucky does not appear to be shopping for a short-term fix so much as another high-upside gamble. The program reportedly made a $2 million NIL play on Jayden Quaintance last season, and Quaintance played four games before knee problems worsened and he was shut down midseason. Thomas is a different player and a different injury case, but the through line is the same: Kentucky keeps willing to wager on talent it believes it can trust later, even when the medical file is not clean.
The tension in Thomas' case is hard to miss. His father described the injury as a clean-up job, saying, in effect, that he took a bad step and woke up the scar tissue and that the problem was not major, only something that needed to be cleaned out. He added that the need for rest was the real fix and that the issue would have surfaced eventually, whether this season, next year or years down the road. That is a family confident in the diagnosis, but it does not erase the fact that Thomas has already gone through one injury, a comeback attempt and another shutdown.
Kentucky now has to decide how much weight to put on the player it saw a year ago versus the one still working back from surgery. If Thomas gets healthy on schedule, the fit looks obvious. If he does not, the portal pursuit becomes another reminder that upside and availability are rarely the same thing.
