Kentucky Faces Valparaiso on Wednesday at Rupp

“I’ll sit in my chair and tell everybody to leave me alone, watch a little TV, watch one of my Alaska shows, watch one of the war stories, get inspired,” Calipari said. “I have the dogs – I let the dogs come around me; no one else. The dogs can sit with me.”

In reality, Calipari spent much of the remainder of Saturday not watching his favorite TV shows, but instead watching the game he was just coaching. Some of the Wildcats’ mistakes were obvious, such as the lack of passing and defensive lapses, while others needed a second and third look.

In a 31-game regular season, a single loss hasn’t and won’t set the Wildcats (7-1) too far back, especially against the team now ranked second in the nation. Lessons were learned against the Bruins – plenty of them – and now Kentucky is working on getting back to the basics before facing it’s next opponent, Valparaiso (7-1), on Wednesday.

“We had film session on Sunday and we watched, we practiced (Monday) and they’re fine,” Coach Cal said. “Look, it is a process. For 24 hours, I mourn and then I’m good. Let’s go.”

Calipari said after the loss to UCLA he skipped a few things in practice, including the pregame shootaround, that he thought his team had moved past in their on-going progression.

“I got away from a lot of stuff because I got like, ‘These guys are better than I thought,’ ” Coach Cal said. “No, they’re not. Anytime I’ve ever thought that about a team, they know we took an L and we need to get back to where we were. Sometimes you take two Ls to get them back to where they need to be.”

On Sunday and Monday, it was back to the basics.

“We know exactly what we did wrong,” sophomore forward Isaac Humphries said Tuesday. “We know exactly how to fix it. We’ve been working really hard yesterday and today we’ll work hard again. So I think tomorrow we’ll be fine.”

As one can expect after allowing 97 points, the most ever in the Calipari era at Kentucky, there was an uptick in the defensive intensity and aggression in the practices.

“We really went hard yesterday because, again, effort was a big issue (in) the UCLA game,” Humphries said. “So we just got back into playing really hard and going at each other.”

The attitude of the Wildcats remains the same: confident.

After beating its first seven opponents by an average of 30.6 points per game, senior forward Derek Willis said then-No. 1 Kentucky got a bit complacent. He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Wenyen Gabriel said the loss to UCLA will ultimately help the Cats get a better feel for what they need to do in order to be successful. 

Humphries harkened back to what Hall of Fame center Yao Ming told him a few years ago about learning from defeats.

“He said if you win and win and win, you don’t really—no one cares about the little things that are going wrong,” Humphries said. “It’s only (when) you lose that you’ll understand that’s not working and you’ll learn from those mistakes.”

A major point of emphasis after the UCLA loss is how Kentucky will defend the four-spot. UCLA freshman forward TJ Leaf “dominated” Kentucky to the tune of 17 points and 13 rebounds. The performance was such that Coach Cal said afterward that he may change his future lineup to include another big man.

The two players that likely affects the most are Gabriel and Willis. Gabriel has started four of the past five games for UK, but was limited to 17 minutes after a few defensive lapses against Leaf and the Bruins. Willis played 22 minutes but grabbed just four rebounds to Gabriel’s eight.

“Like try to stay in front of the guy,” said Calipari when asked what Gabriel and Willis need to do defensively. “When he drives, try to be somewhere in the vicinity in front of him so he’s not driving and shooting a straight-line layup. Probably that’s the very first thing, and after that we can work on some other stuff.”

The work Kentucky has put in Sunday, Monday and Tuesday will be on display Wednesday against a Valparaiso team that is receiving votes in both the Associated Press Top 25 and the USA Today Coaches’ Poll. Coincidentally, the Crusaders are led by Alec Peters, an All-America candidate who will challenge Kentucky at that very same four-spot.

The 24-hour rule is long over and past for UK. Now it’s about putting in the work to not have to go through it again.

“It is a process,” Coach Cal said. “I get like you: We should win every single game that we play, we should go 82-0, win every game by – then I wake up and I’m like, ‘What am I thinking? Let’s go. Let’s just get back to work and get better.’ ”

After posting just the second triple-double in school history last week, guard De’Aaron Fox was named the Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Week on Monday. Fox becomes the first player in the league this year to win two weekly SEC honors. He also won SEC Freshman of the Week the opening week of the season.

Fox averaged 17.0 points, a team-high 9.5 assists and 6.5 rebounds for the week in games against Arizona State in the Bahamas and at home vs. then-No. 11/9 UCLA. The highlight of the week was his game against the Sun Devils on Monday, when he posted 14 points, a career-high 11 rebounds and 10 assists. It marked the school’s first triple-double since Chris Mills posted the program’s first one on Dec. 27, 1988.

Fox was simply brilliant in the win over Arizona State. He was 6 for 9 from the field and recorded nine rebounds by halftime. His 10 assists led a balanced and explosive Kentucky offense, as the Wildcats broke the 100-point mark for a third consecutive game – the first time that had been done since December 1977 – and dished out 33 total assists, the most in the John Calipari era and just two off the school record. Against the Bruins, Fox scored 20 points, just one off his career high, and just missed out on a double- double with a game-high nine assists.

Freshman guard Malik Monk scored 24 points, including 4 of 8 from 3-point range, but top-ranked Kentucky fell to No. 11/9 UCLA 97-92 on Saturday at Rupp Arena in a high-scoring, fast-paced outing that pitted two of the nation’s top teams against eachother in an early season showdown.

In a battle of the two programs with the most NCAA Tournament championships all-time, Kentucky had four players in double figures. However, UCLA had six players in double figures in the contest and that balanced scoring effort was enough to secure the victory.

The game was close throughout the first half, but the Bruins closed the half on a 12-4 run, capped by a 3-pointer by Lonzo Ball, to take a 49-45 lead at the half. And in the second half, UCLA picked up where it left off, outscoring Kentucky 11-2 to start the second half, opening a 60-47 lead in the process. Kentucky fought back in the second half behind Monk, who scored 15 of his points after the break. However, the Wildcats were never able to get even with the Bruins, who shot 53 percent from the field in the game, compared to just 41.3 percent shooting for Kentucky.

The Wildcats got a double-double from Bam Adebayo, who had 18 points and 13 rebounds. Freshman point guard De’Aaron Fox had 20 points and nine assists, while sophomore guard Isaiah Briscoe had 12 points.

Other notables:

• The loss snapped a 42-game winning streak in Rupp Arena for the Cats, the second-longest streak in Rupp Arena history

• It was just the third loss in program history at home as the No. 1 ranked team in the country. The other two losses at home were only by one-point margins

• Monk has reached the 20-point plateau in four consecutive outings

• Monk has hit 25 3-pointers through the first eight games of the year, ahead of Jodie Meek’s record-setting pace of 21 during the 2008-09 season

• Fox has dished out nine or more assists in back-to-back games. His 62 assists is ahead of single-season record-holder Tyler Ulis (35) from a season ago

• UCLA’s 97 points were the most yielded by UK in the Calipari era, while the team’s 92 points scored is the most scored in a loss under Cal

• Isaiah Briscoe scored 12 points and has reached double digits in all six games that he has played

• It was the first time an opponent had shot 50 percent or better against UK since Mississippi State did it on Jan. 12, 2016, although the Wildcats won that game 80-74