Game Tape the Greatest Gift for Cats
Friday’s exhibition – the first opportunity for the Wildcats to face an opponent – had to feel like Christmas morning for Kentucky fans.
John Calipari, meanwhile, had to wait until later to open his present.
“I told them prior to the game, you know what I’m excited about: watching this tape after the game,” Calipari said.
While fans flock to watch the Cats at Rupp Arena and on TV for the dunks and fast-break baskets – of which there were plenty in a 103-61 win over Thomas More College – Coach Cal is eager for these exhibitions so he can learn about his newest team.
“I got to learn more about them,” Calipari said. “They have got to learn about themselves. They got to self-evaluate.”
With all that in mind, Coach Cal already has a plan for what Saturday morning will look like. For starters, every player will review a personal film cut-up with a coach. As a team, the Cats will review a handful of good clips and a handful of not-so-good ones on both offense and defense.
Kevin Knox, who poured in a game-high 27 points, is already anticipating where the focus will be.
“We got film in the morning,” Knox said. “I know we’re going to watch nothing but defense, probably. Got on us about the Blue-White Game. He really wants us to be really good defensively. We’re probably one of the longest teams in the country, so we gotta be able to play defense. If we’re trying to win a championship, defense is going to be one of the biggest reasons we win it.”
Be it offense or defense, Coach Cal will have plenty of mistakes to teach from, what with the 17 turnovers and 27 fouls the Cats committed. You might think that would lead to some players hiding in the back of the room trying to dodge being called out, but don’t count Quade Green among them.
“I would want him to be hard on me more than anything because I’m the point guard,” Green said. “Once he’s hard on me everybody is going to be like, ‘Oh yeah, he’s hard on Q all the time,’ and he’s going to be hard on anybody so it doesn’t matter.”
Green had nine points on 3-of-4 3-point shooting to go with his seven assists, but he knows he won’t be immune to criticism. He embraces that though.
“It helps us because you can’t make the same mistake,” Green said. “If he tells you once, don’t make the same mistake again. Film really breaks everything down. Look where you’re at. It just shows you next time in practice you gotta get where you gotta get.”
With so much learning to be done, the Cats can’t afford to waste a single opportunity to do it.
“There’s things that they’re going to have to learn and I’m going to be honest with you: You can’t skip steps with a team like this,” Calipari said. “I’ve said it before. When you have all freshmen you cannot skip steps. It’s one at a time. We may be ugly early; I just hope we’re not just awful early and that we do enough to be able to play some of these people we have early.”
Coach Cal has no idea what this team is right now, let alone what it will become. That’s why UK tinkered with a press. That’s why Calipari trotted out nearly every conceivable lineup from among his eight available scholarship players. That’s why you saw the Cats throwing into the post so often.
The only way for the Cats to figure out what works and what doesn’t is to try things in a live environment, no matter the result.
“Like I said, I’ll watch the tape and I’m trying to figure out how exactly this team has got to play,” Calipari said. “And there may be things we’re doing right now that a month from now we won’t do because I didn’t like it and we’ll try new stuff. Then at some point hopefully it all comes together to where we see it, that they’re defending and bouncing and blocking and running and dunking and making shots and all of a sudden it’s like, OK, you got this.”
