The finish was fun and it’s impossible to hate that second-half offensive explosion that included 53 points scored on 65/73/79 shooting splits, but Big Blue Nation all thought the same thing once the final horn sounded on Kentucky‘s 75-74 victory…
Why does it take a Malachi Miracle to pull off an 18-point comeback victory? Why can’t the Wildcats make life a little easier on themselves by playing for 40 minutes instead of 19?
Mark Pope knows this product isn’t the prettiest thing in the world right now and they’ve got plenty to work on, but for this game in particular, you have to give credit where it is due against a tough and desperate LSU team that needed that win just as much as Kentucky did. The Tigers were also a little uncharacteristic in the sense that, like the Wildcats, they’re known for late responses not early punches.
“Credit to LSU,” Pope said during his postgame radio show. “They’re big and long and physical, and they’ve — you know, it was interesting. We’ve had this conversation as a staff, because they had a great comeback against South Carolina, a great comeback at Vanderbilt, where they were really blown out in the first half, and then they just came back. As we watched those games and talked about it as a staff, it wasn’t that they went on a scoring spurt. It was that their defense locked down for a segment for seven minutes. They just wouldn’t give a bucket, even against the best teams in this league.
“Defensively, they were a real problem for us in the first half, and we’re having a tough time getting downhill. Our energy wasn’t great. Or force downhill wasn’t great, and so we had to kind of change our spacing scheme offensively.”
His messaging was similar at the postgame podium, admitting that Matt McMahon’s group had Pope’s offense totally out of sorts in the first half. But, again, that’s why you play two halves instead of just one.
After taking one on the chin in the first 20 minutes, trailing 38-22 at the break after scoring just six points in the first 10 minutes, the Wildcats responded in a major way to get shots to fall and flip the game upside down with momentum swinging quickly.
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LSU brought the fight early, then Kentucky fought back… eventually.
“I was proud of the guys. We have to credit LSU, they’re a terrific defensive team that, they’ve been a comeback team in their first three games, and they switch a lot,” Pope said. “They’re long, they’re physical, they’re athletic, and that really hurt us in the first half. We were pretty stymied. Our movement was poor, our response to the physicality of the game was poor.
“Our guys did a great job in the second half, responding and engaging in that — it’s a fist fight. Like, that’s what this game is. Instead of just getting knocked around and bumped off lines and cutting lines and bumped off ball screen attacks and bumped off post catches and getting to the rim, our guys were much more forceful in the second half, and it was a change. Credit our guys for responding that way.”
Is any of that acceptable? Not necessarily. We’d all like stress-free victories every time out, but that’s not always possible. Sometimes you just have to take wins however you can get them, especially just days removed from losing your starting point guard for the season and still being without your future lottery pick in the frontcourt.
Considering how the season started, beggars can’t be choosers.
One thing Pope is sure of, however, is that his group isn’t going to lay down and die.
“This group is — we have some warts, we have some things we’re trying to figure out. But this group is a group that’s going to stay in there,” he said. “There were 15 times in the second half where we could have folded, and there were more than that in the first, but they just kept hammering away. I think Otega (Oweh)’s leadership was great. I think (Denzel Aberdeen)’s leadership was great.
“I thought we got a lot of great concerted efforts where our guys did a good job not paying attention to scoreboard and just trying to continue to compete harder and harder.”
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