UK Marches on as 3 Streak Ends
BOISE, Idaho – Wenyen Gabriel got a history lesson on Thursday night.
He knew about Kentucky’s record streak of games with a made 3-pointer, but he didn’t realize the scope of it.
One thousand, forty-seven games since Nov. 26, 1988 with a 3.
“Thirty years?” Gabriel said. “I didn’t know it was that crazy.”
The reason for the history lesson, of course, was that the aforementioned streak had ended. The Wildcats missed all their 3-point tries in a first-round NCAA Tournament game against Davidson at Taco Bell Arena. Gabriel, who missed his only attempt on Thursday less than a week after making 7-of-7 treys in the Southeastern Conference Tournament last weekend, was sad it had ended.
Not nearly as sad as he would have been had something much more significant ended on Thursday evening.
“That’s kind of disappointing, I’m not going to lie,” Gabriel said. “At least the season didn’t end.”
Indeed, fifth-seeded UK’s season did not end, as the Wildcats managed to down No. 12 seed Davidson, 78-73. Davidson outscored UK by 33 points from beyond the arc, hitting 11-of-33 tries, but John Calipari’s Cats won where it counted thanks to an expertly devised game plan. It was the first win in school history without a made 3-pointer since the 3 went into effect in the 1986-87 season.
“We didn’t want to get into a 3-point shootout with Davidson,” Gabriel said. “You’re not going to win that type of game just shooting 3s against them. So we tried to run them off the line and our plan was to get to the rim and make them play defense.”
While Davidson is among the best 3-point shooting teams in the country, UK had a significant advantage in size and athleticism. Coach Cal would have been crazy to have directed his team to ignore it, so he didn’t.
“Coach told us we could attack,” said Kevin Knox, who missed three 3-point tries but capitalized on UK’s approach to score 25 points inside the arc. “They weren’t really guarding us off the dribble. We did a really good job of getting downhill, getting some dunks, some layups, getting to the free-throw line. Some nights shots just aren’t falling, but we did a really good job of getting downhill.”
UK got downhill to the tune of 36 points in the paint and 26 made free throws in 32 attempts, compensating for that lack of production from behind the arc.
“It just shows us and the rest of the country we don’t have to play our best, we don’t have to make a lot of shots or shoot our best to win,” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. “We can still grit it out and win going to the basket and stuff like that.”
The Wildcats will need to make some 3s to continue advancing, starting on Saturday when they take on No. 13 seed Buffalo at 5:15 p.m. ET, but the good news is they had been before Thursday. Over their previous seven games, they had shot 36.4 percent or better in all but one game, including a 10-of-16 (62.5 percent) performance against Missouri and 12 of 18 (66.7 percent) against Alabama.
“In the last five games we shot over 40 percent,” Calipari said. “But we’re not a team that relies on 3s. I wouldn’t like to go 0 for 6, but we’d like to make five, six, seven, maybe eight 3s. There’s other teams that need to make 12, 13, 14 to win; we’re just not one of them.”
Three-point shooting, in other words, is important, but it’s not the most important thing for Kentucky.
“You have to defend and rebound in this thing,” Calipari said. “Again, we can’t go 0-for from the 3-point line. You have to make some shots. And I always say this: You don’t have to make them all. You just can’t miss them all. You can’t miss every one.”
Coach Cal is confident that won’t happen again.
“This is a good shooting team,” Calipari said. “We only took six. If we took six more we’d have been 6 of 12.”
