UK alum Tom Leach has been the play-by-play “Voice of the Wildcats” for the football Cats for 12 years and 9 year’s for men’s basketball. He is a four-time winner of the Kentucky Sportscaster of the Year award. Tom offers an entertaining and insightful perspective into UK athletics. Column entries will be posted twice per week through April. Read Tom’s full biography
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With a win over Arkansas tomorrow, Kentucky will no doubt ascend to the top spot in the nation’s major college basketball polls. And if the Cats keep winning, you’ll soon start to see stories comparing these Cats to the last team (Indiana ’76) to complete an undefeated season.
ESPN’s Jay Bilas is in line with most every analyst out there in thinking Kentucky will not enter March Madness with a perfect record. And he says a knock or two is not necessarily a bad thing.
“The problem with young players, and no one has a time machine to make them older, is they are going to see some adversity and it will be the first they have ever faced,” Bilas told tomleachky.com. “I go back to (last year’s) North Carolina team. They are the model for what I am talking about. They had been knocked down a lot during their career. That senior class last year had lost in the first round to George Mason. Then the next year, they got to the Elite Eight and lost to Georgetown in a game they had won and should have won. Then, the third year, they make it to the Final Four and get blitzed by Kansas. So they had be knocked down and had to get back up again.
“To this point, Kentucky has responded to challenges but they haven’t gotten knocked down yet. I think that the best thing for a team is to get knocked down. I believe Kentucky is going to lose and most basketball observers are going to agree with that. When they lose, it is not going to be any fun for Kentucky fans, but for Kentucky, it’s not going to be the worst thing in the world,” he added. “It will be kind of like that book ‘The Value of a Skinned Knee’. Getting knocked down and having to get back up again is a good thing for a basketball player and basketball team.”
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Like all of us, Bilas has seen all of the hype about John Wall but the ESPN analyst and former Duke star says what makes Kentucky a legitimate title threat is the help that Wall has.
“He has got NBA All Star ability and is learning how to harness it. It is enjoyable to watch him learning how to harness it. He has the ability to explode in spurts and score 10 points in a row or make Sportscenter-type plays,” he said, “but the beauty of it is that he is not alone. I worked with DeMarcus Cousins at the Nike Skills Academy between his sophomore and junior year. I think he is the best rebounder in the country ability-wise and that certainly bears out on per-minute. He has a lot of maturing to do. And then there is Eric Bledsoe. Some people think that Bledsoe is getting overlooked in a big way because of his ability level and being overshadowed by John Wall. I think Wall is the better prospect but Bledsoe is a pro. They have four pros in the starting lineup. You could look at Final Four teams in the past and say okay, that team is a championship contender. They have four starters in the starting line up out of the gate and if all of them were a little bit older this wouldn’t even be a contest. You would be talking about Kentucky being the best team. Experience is the only thing keeping me from saying that.”
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Kentucky’s annual matchup with Arkansas no doubt rekindles some good memories for Cameron Mills. The one-time walkon had his breakout performance in a game against the Hogs on Super Bowl Sunday, 1997.
Mills got his chance after Derek Anderson went down with a knee injury and he responded with 12 points off the bench in the Cats’ 10-point win in Fayetteville. And that led to Mills becoming a valuable contributor on teams that played for the title (’97) and won it (’98).
Coach Calipari has talked about bench play being a key to this UK team’s long-term development and Mills says players in that role need to have the right mindset.
“You try to make an impact on defense first. You’re looking for opportunities to help out, to shoot the gap and make a steal. What your mentality needs to be is, ‘just because I’m coming off the bench, there shouldn’t be any expectation of a letdown’,” he told coachcal.com. “I shouldn’t have that expectation, my shouldn’t have that expectations and my teammates shouldn’t have that expectation. That was what was so impressive about the ’96 team. The opponents never had a break. The second team came in and they put the opponents through it just like the first team did. The sixth game, the seventh guy, the eighth guy coming off the bench for coach Cal, their attitude needs to be ‘it doesn’t get easier for the opponent–it gets harder’. ”
And as a former UK player, Mills is thrilled with the way Calipari has embraced the full scope of the role of coach of college basketball’s all-time winningest program.
“The thing that was very evident early on was that he understood something you have to understand at the University of Kentucky–that is, you’re not just the basketball coach. I would say your responsibilities are probably split 50-50 in being a basketball coach and being an ambassador for not only the University of Kentucky but the commonwealth of Kentucky. He understood that from the git-go,” Mill said.
“He understands that every little 80-year old lady’s hand that he shakes and says ‘she’s the biggest UK fan he’ll ever meet and she used to listen to the games on the radio’ and he understands that the impression he makes on her matters,” he continued. “It’s fun to watch and he’s got the entire state exicted. And what he did with the Haiti relief. Who thinks of that? There wasn’t another coach that even thought of that and then to pull it off in two days and to raise a million dollars. But what he understood is that the state of Kentucky is capable of pulling it off if they’ve got somebody like him leading the charge. That’s one of the reasons he’s so special.”
