Cats Must Find Lessons in Shocking Defeat
John Calipari knows early lessons must be learned every year, but doing so through hard-fought wins is always his preference.
You can’t always get what you want.
A day after moving to No. 1 in the Associated Press Top 25, Kentucky was upset by Evansville at Rupp Arena.
“They smelled they could win the game and they finished,” Calipari said. “They finished strong. And we didn’t. This was a great lesson for all of us, including me. I mean, we could say they got outplayed and I could tell you I got outcoached.”
UK (2-1) trailed nearly 30 minutes against an Evansville team led by 1996 national champion and Wildcat legend Walter McCarty, now the head coach for the Purple Aces. A rally in the final minutes was undone by a couple missed free throws and a couple killer offensive rebounds before Tyrese Maxey’s long would-be game-tying 3-pointer missed at the buzzer of a shocking 67-64 defeat for the Wildcats.
“Walter and their team deserved to win,” Coach Cal said. “If we would have somehow pulled it out it kind of wouldn’t even have been fair because they fought us the whole game and they were the tougher team. They executed, they made shots and 3s and free throws. My hat’s off to them. It’s hard to do that in this building, but they were more ready to play. He had his team better prepared than I had my team.”
Mere minutes after the game, Coach Cal was already looking inward.
“I don’t ever blame the kids on this kind of stuff,” Calipari said. “I look at myself and say, OK, what was wrong with the preparation? OK, we are only practicing with seven, eight guys. Well, how do we make it so that we still get something done and that we don’t have this kind of step way back and almost accept that, you know, I’m getting outworked today.”
Though Calipari was quick to take the blame for the loss, his players of course will be challenged in its wake. How they respond will determine the course of the season.
“We may look back in a couple weeks and say, this is the greatest thing that ever happened to this team,” Calipari said. “We also may look back in a couple weeks and say what in the heck? They’re not changing.”
Early signs on that front are positive.
“It is a great lesson that you gotta come out and play every game your hardest, every single game like it’s your last,” Maxey said. “I feel like we didn’t do that tonight, but we gotta bounce back and we gotta get back in the lab.”
Nate Sestina, as you would expect from a player as experienced as he is, was even firmer in his response. The graduate transfer from Bucknell wasn’t having any of Coach Cal shouldering all the blame, especially given his intimate familiarity with being a member of a mid-major team trying to score an upset.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” Sestina said. “For me personally, it’s deflating because I got absolutely outplayed today. It’s frustrating because you focus and you prepare, you watch film and you do all these things. You do all the little things to prepare for a game like and I’ve been in that position before. To get outhustled when I’ve been there is so frustrating for me. I’m not too happy about it.”
Immanuel Quickley has never had that experience, but he was on the UK team that suffered a different kind of shocking defeat one year and six days ago. As unpleasant as that memory may be, Quickley knows the Wildcats would be wise to call on it now.
“I think just the like Duke last year, when we got smacked in the face it kind of woke all of us up and we were able to regroup,” Quickley said. “That’s really what we’re playing for. We’re playing for March. We’re playing for hopefully April to make a deep tournament run.”
That, really, is at the heart of it all. This loss is embarrassing, no question. Social media might be buzzing with all sorts of historical perspective on the defeat and the players’ Twitter mentions are assuredly not all positive. Regardless what happens over the remaining 28 games of the regular season and beyond, the loss will always follow this Kentucky team. It’s still within the Wildcats’ power to define themselves though.
“It’s November 12th, right?” Sestina said. “So we have five, six more months of college basketball. We’ll be fine. It’s one game. It’s a frustrating loss and everybody understands that. I know there’s 13 guys in the locker room that are ready to get back after it and whoever we play next, hopefully we’re ready to go.”
