Kentucky head coach John Calipari
On why Kevin Knox couldn’t get going tonight …
“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him. It wasn’t just Kevin. We made one jump shot in the first half, and that was by Sacha (Killeya-Jones). The biggest thing is we still refuse to pass the ball. I don’t have the answer for that. And then when a guy runs a guy over and takes a bad shot, he says, ‘No one’s passing.’ Shai (Gilgeous-Alexander) had six assists, but he still had four or five plays where he could have passed it to guys and Quade (Green) the same thing. All of them. It’s almost like I don’t care if you’re open or not, you’re going to have to pass it. I don’t have the answer right now, but you gotta create shots for each other. You can’t—the game’s too hard. Give Missouri credit. They did a great job and fought and I thought we had our chances start of the second half. And then we come down and do freshman stuff and they go basket, basket. And all of a sudden, you look up it’s nine. Like, what just happened? And so, late in the timeouts, ‘We’re not fouling here.’ ‘We are fouling here.’ We did the opposite. Literally did the opposite. I was happy the players were getting on each other for not listening, but that’s what young guys do. What young guys do when they’re trying to establish themselves is they’re defensive and they’re into their own self. So they lose some of the stuff, the team stuff. And we gotta get through this.”
On whether he will have to consider benching Hamidou Diallo with his mistakes …
“I hope not. I’m hoping–and I keep telling these guys, I don’t think any of them are playing great. They’re not playing bad bad. And they’ve had some bad games, but I’m just waiting for them to break through. Most of it is, ‘Play this way,’ and guys are fighting that. Like, ‘I’m going to play my way,’ which means, ‘I am not passing,’ which means none of us pass, which means no easy shots and you’re in a dogfight. Which we’ve been in 15 times this year.”
On whether he’s glad in a way they didn’t find a way to win so they can learn a lesson …
“No. I wish we would have won. No, not at all. No. No. No. Look, I told them at halftime, ‘Every game I coach, every minute I coach, I’m saying how do we win this game.’ And I don’t think about losing until the horn goes off. Even this game. We were five (points down) and I’m thinking, ‘OK, we got a chance.’ We got a 3 in the corner that got blocked. If that goes down, it’s a two-point game. And I’m just thinking, ‘How do we win?’ The problem is you gotta have a team thinking like you think as a coach and if a guy’s not playing well, when they’re this young, it’s hard for them. They’re not thinking about anything else. They’re thinking about how they’re playing. Disappointing, but give Missouri credit. They beat us. It wasn’t just what we did to ourselves. They beat us.”
On whether he has experience he can call on to get this team to share the ball …
“I’ve done this a long time, but I haven’t had a team this young. When they’re this young, each player is trying to establish who they are as a player and it just takes time. I was disappointed with a bunch of guys in the room. We need Shai to do some of the stuff he’s doing, but he took 16 shots. He needs to take about 10 shots. You had your two point guards take 27 shots.”
On falling behind early …
“We got a couple guys that are playing better when we’re down. My thing is, you can’t wait to be down to play this way. This has gotta be who we are. This one should sting them, but we’ll see. The road for us, the next eight games, shew. We could lose all eight. You look at them. You got four on the road, four at home and the ones you have at home are, you know. So we gotta pick it up and let’s go and figure this out and, as a coach, like I said, I coached the whole game. I wasn’t going to give up on them and I didn’t. I’m challenged when guys aren’t listening in timeouts. That’s a hard one. You call them over, ‘What didn’t you hear?’ ‘I wasn’t listening.’ ‘Oh.’ I mean, we got some of team. I still believe in this team and I still believe we have the most upside of any team in the country. It’s just that unless you play together as a team, unless you create shots for each other, unless you cover for each other defensively, unless you talk more, you can’t ever become a good team. And then, each individual player is hurt. Now all of a sudden you say, ‘He’s not that good and he’s not that good and what happened to him today? Why isn’t he that good? And he’s not that good.’ That’s what happens when you don’t play well together. When you play well together, you start saying, ‘Wow, he is really good and that extra pass. Did you see him make that shot?’ They create for each other. They’re still fighting it a little bit.”
On his frustration …
“I’ve just done it 30 years, so you kind of get to where this is all part of it. And the good news for me, I haven’t been through a whole lot of these. As you get older, they get harder to deal with. But I’ll say this: I love winning and enjoy winning and bringing teams together and seeing guys get better. Sometimes you gotta be hard on them. Tell them, ‘Your will is not stronger than mine.’ And so we’re kind of in that with this group. I try to find five guys that can pass it to each other. That’s all I was looking for. And I thought at the start of the half we did it. And then all of a sudden we kind of reverted and then all of a sudden it’s nine again and I couldn’t find five guys that would pass it to each other. But, these kids aren’t machines. They’re not robots. They don’t play great every night out. They get going the right way and the right way is really hard and you really gotta share and you really gotta be about everybody else. So they’ll try their own way again. ‘I don’t like that. I’d rather do my stuff.’ And it is what it is. That’s what coaching is. And it’s easy when you’re winning. When you get beat and you gotta bring a team together, that’s when I look at guys in our profession and say, ‘That guy’s really coaching.’ For us right now, we shouldn’t have won the last game. We shouldn’t have. Vandy did everything they should have to win. They missed two free throws. We get a lucky foul, boom, boom, make two, beat them in overtime, but it is what it is.”
Jarred Vanderbilt
On the shooting struggles …
“Some games they just don’t fall. You gotta find another way to continue to get baskets. Like I said, today they just weren’t falling.”
On what happened in the exchange late in the first half …
“Just two competitive guys going after the ball. That’s all it was. It was a pivotal point in the game and we were just going after the ball.”
On Calipari’s message at halftime …
“Just to fight. This wasn’t the first time we were down. Just come back second half. We started off second half, we got some stops and got things going, but we just gotta start putting that together for 40 minutes.”
On why things haven’t yet come together for 40 minutes …
“Just getting into the rotations. Like I said, we got a new rotation, especially with me being inserted and Q (Quade Green) coming back. So right now we’re just trying to make it all work collectively.”
On what Calipari said after the game …
“Just to fight. Whether we’re down 10, up 10, just fight the whole game. Give max effort when you’re out there and pretty much just bring energy. We need to do it as a team, not just a couple players. The whole team.”
On whether the game plan was to speed up the game and create turnovers …
“That’s just how we want to play, period. We just want to get stops and try to get out in transition and I feel like we got a lot of guys that can excel in transition, so that’s our goal right now: get stops and try to get fast breaks.”
On Kevin Knox’s struggles and whether the booing affected him …
“Nothing. I mean, he’s human. It happens. You have good games; you have bad games. This happened to be one of them.”
