Cats' Fight on Display, Long Road Ahead Too
The hot takes were coming from all sides.
An impending blowout, they said. The stage was too big, too soon. Kentucky just wasn’t ready yet.
The reaction to Kansas building an 11-point lead in the opening minutes might have been popular, but not on the UK bench.
“We were just fighting,” Kevin Knox said. “I give it to my teammates. We really fought tonight. A lot of people had us losing this game at least by 20, 30 points, but we said before the game we weren’t letting that happen.”
The Wildcats, though they had every reason to panic facing a top-five opponent in the State Farm Champions Classic, didn’t. Instead, they settled in, found their feet and gave the Jayhawks everything they had. It ended up not being quite enough, as the Cats fell in Chicago, 65-61.
“We’re a ways away to being what we need to be, but playing in a game like this, in that environment and have a chance to win?” Calipari said. “Wow. Bunch of freshmen did pretty good.”
The outcome might have been disappointing, but the fight UK (2-1) showed along the way was anything but. Lots went wrong for the Cats – much of it their own doing – but they never let go of the rope against Kansas (2-0), as Coach Cal so often likes to say.
“They’re a veteran team; we’re a real young team,” Knox said. “A lot of people thought they had the advantage, but tonight we really fought our butts off. We played really hard in the second half. We really could have won the game, to be honest.
Knox didn’t shy away from the big moment or the big shot, hitting his first three 3-pointers to steady his team in the early going. His last bucket, which gave him 20 points, was an important one too, answering a Kansas 3 with just under two minutes remaining to keep the Cats alive.
“I know that my first two games I kind of struggled shooting the ball, but I know I gotta keep shooting,” Knox said. “So I kept shooting tonight and tonight they were falling. Hopefully I can get more consistent. But tonight, the jump shot was falling. Getting to the basket, my floater was falling. So I just gotta keep shooting and don’t let misses affect my play.”
While Knox seems poised to be UK’s featured scorer, the Cats also may have established a valuable post presence in Sacha Killeya-Jones. Killeya-Jones saw minimal time as a freshman, so his eight-point, nine-rebound effort was the best of his Kentucky career.
“In practices, he’s been working his butt off,” Knox said. “Hitting that mid-range shot that he hit tonight, he’s hitting that consistently now in practice. Rebounding his butt off, playing hard, playing with energy on the defensive end, blocking shots and, like Cal said, you do it in practice it’s going to translate to the game.”
“I was just fighting, trying to come out and help my team win and do the things I could do to give us the best chance to put us in a winning situation,” Killeya-Jones said.
Eight of Killeya-Jones’ nine rebounds came after halftime, helping correct UK’s biggest first-half issue. The Cats were outrebounded 24-13 and outscored 15-2 in second-chance points in the first 20 minutes, but reversed that and evened up the battle of boards 39-39 by the time all was said and done.
“I was stunned we were down one at half when we gave up 15 offensive rebounds and we had one,” Calipari said. “But I was very clear, if we didn’t rebound we would have no chance of winning the game. I thought we rebounded pretty good in the second half.”
Unfortunately, a lapse that led to five Jayhawk second-chance points in a 65-second stretch late keyed a game-turning 6-0 run. Development of Coach Cal’s youngest team to date, clearly, will come in fits and starts.
“I gotta keep being positive with these guys, and I gotta keep picking them up, and I gotta keep teaching, and coaching, and encouraging, and prodding,” Calipari said. “I can’t accept what they’re giving. I gotta keep pushing them. I’ve been very hard on these guys in practice, probably harder on this group than any team I’ve coached in my – how many years have I been at Kentucky?”
This is year nine for Coach Cal at UK. If Tuesday night is any indication, it could be both one of his most difficult and most rewarding yet.
