Kentucky Coach John Calipari has adopted a somewhat caustic attitude toward the Division I men’s basketball selection committee, which last season gave his team what he felt was an overly difficult road to the Final Four (it got there anyway).  Asked last week which team he would prefer not to face in the N.C.A.A. tournament, he said sarcastically of the committee, “They called the Lakers, and they can’t pull out of the N.B.A. right now.”  He went on: “I think if we had to see Oklahoma City or Cleveland, those would be tough. I’m not sure. And they tell me that Portland’s as big as we are, so those would be teams I wouldn’t want to see.”  Though his point was taken, on this specific nuance he was wrong: The N.B.A.’s Trail Blazers are not as big as Kentucky. Nor are the Lakers, the Thunder or the Cavaliers. According to a calculation by The New York Times, counting players who played at least one quarter of a game’s minutes on average, the Minnesota Timberwolves, after some midseason trades, were the only N.B.A. team taller than Kentucky, whose oldest regular player is 21.  As the Wildcats (34-0, 18-0 Southeastern Conference) enter the tournament, they are not only, by consensus, the best team in Division I men’s basketball (primarily thanks to their stellar defense), but they are also the tallest.  Calipari would have it no other way.  “My goal is to have a 6-9 point guard — I’ll take a 6-8 — and a team that’s 6-9 across the board,” he said recently. (One of three high school players who have already committed verbally to Kentucky is the 6-foot-11 center Skal Labissiere.)  He added, “So when you ask me what’s the downside, well, we’re big, and it’s tough on the airplanes.”  Not even the freshman guard Tyler Ulis, who is 5-9 and plays about 23 minutes a game, drags Kentucky’s height down to second place, which is occupied by Florida State. (Other tournament-bound teams that are very tall include Maryland, Wisconsin, Providence and Virginia.)  The Kentucky Wildcats are taller than all other N.C.A.A. Division I teams and all but one N.B.A. team, the Minnesota Timberwolves.Team members who play, on average, at least one-quarter of a game’s minutes are included in this chart.  Average height of starters and key bench players  By The New York Times  “It helps me be able to play my game, get up on the ball,” Ulis said of being surrounded by comparative giants. “Sometimes if I make a mistake, there’s 7-footers in the lane — you can’t really shoot over them.”  Though Kentucky is taller than average at all five positions, its advantage really shows up in the frontcourt, which at any given time is invariably occupied by two of five players — Marcus Lee, Trey Lyles, Karl-Anthony Towns, Dakari Johnson and Willie Cauley-Stein — who are 6-9, 6-10, 6-11, 7-0 and 7-0, although the assistant John Robic recently referred to Cauley-Stein as “7 and a half-inch.” All play substantial numbers of minutes, thanks to a modified platoon system that uses frequent substitutions.  The statistics site KenPom.com attempts to quantify height further with a figure called “effective height,” which adjusts team height by position. Here, too, Kentucky is tops in the college game at +6.9. Its height advantage shows up most starkly at power forward, and then at center. Only three teams since 2007 have had higher effective heights.  As early as last year’s N.C.A.A. tournament, some Internet commenters took to calling the Kentucky team Monstars, a reference to the gigantic alien dream team that takes on the ragtag bunch led by Michael Jordan in the 1996 film “Space Jam.”  “They’ve tweeted pictures of it to us,” Lyles said this month. “It’s a funny thing that the fans do.”  Cauley-Stein added with a grimace — a sign, perhaps, that he knew that the Monstars in the film ultimately lose — “It’s good stuff.”  It might sound silly to say that having an abundance of tall players is a distinct advantage for a basketball team — sort of like asserting that an ability to project one’s voice is an advantage for a public speaker.  Yet, if anything, height might be underrated, according to David Epstein, author of the book “The Sports Gene.” After crunching numbers, Epstein found that height and wingspan — a related measurement, of the arms from fingertip to fingertip — correlate strongly with total rebounds, offensive rebounds and blocks.  “Even in the N.B.A., which is restricting your data to the best people in the world, it still has some predictive value,” Epstein said.  In the case of Kentucky, height is crucial, but primarily as a starting point. According to analysts, opposing coaches and the players themselves, Kentucky’s achievement, particularly on defense, is also the result of general athleticism and disciplined play.  “It’s not a complicated game if you’ve got really good talent, that size, they play together, and are well-coached,” the CBS analyst Clark Kellogg said.  What Kentucky’s tremendous height does is provide a sort of safety net, so that defenders can take a chance on the big play. This shows up in the fact that Kentucky’s turnover percentage is among the country’s best on both offense and defense.  Sometimes that means perimeter players going for a steal. Other times, it is defenders staying on their men and trusting a driving player’s defender to protect the rim — as Cauley-Stein has done several times this year in highlight-reel-worthy blocks.  “It allows you to gamble more,” Cauley-Stein said this month. He added, “They end up driving on you, someone’s going to get it.”  Of course, more often than not, the person who is going to get the ball is Cauley-Stein, the Southeastern Conference defensive player of the year.  Georgia Coach Mark Fox is among those in awe.  He said: “They have, I think, the distinct advantage in that their big players, like Cauley-Stein, they can play defense away from the basket, and they’re so mobile that they’re just as effective defenders as their perimeter players are away from the basket. That’s what makes them so hard to score on, because those guys can cover ground.”  Fox mentioned this before the SEC tournament semifinals, in which Calipari put Cauley-Stein on Auburn’s best scorer, K. T. Harrell, even though Harrell is a 6-4 guard. Though he scored some points on free throws, Harrell ended the game 1 of 12 from the field.  Still, as flexible as Kentucky is against teams that try to play small ball and draw Kentucky’s power forwards and centers away from the rim, Florida Coach Billy Donovan said that teams with more traditional big men might as well abandon hope upon entering the court.  Sounding a note of pity, Donovan said, “I think the traditional post-up teams will have a really, really hard time, because even if you get a guy in foul trouble, they’re going to have 25 fouls across the front line, you know what I mean?”  He paused, as if marveling, and added: “Even if you foul a guy out. The total depth.”  It is difficult to say exactly where this year’s Wildcats team ranks compared with those of past years, given that this is a down season for offenses. But this team is historically good on that side of the court, holding opposing teams to the fewest points per possession and the lowest field-goal percentage since 1975. Adjusting for opponents, Kentucky is the second-most defensively efficient team since at least 2002, according to KenPom.com.  The one team even better on defense was the 2008-9 Memphis Tigers. They, too, were tall. And they, too, were coached by Calipari. For the record, he said Sunday, he is around 6 feet.  A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 2015, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wildcats, No. 1 in Height, Too, Relish the View From on High. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The unbeaten Wildcats are not just taller over all than any other N.C.A.A. Division I team; they are taller than every N.B.A. team except the Minnesota Timberwolves.