‘That’s Just Us’: UK Finds a Way at Florida
The way John Calipari saw things, his team had a simple choice.
With Kentucky down a starting point guard and 10 points in a hostile environment at Florida, Calipari laid it out plainly.
“Should we go to the bus and surrender,” Coach Cal said. “Or do you guys want to fight? There’s only two options.”
Option number two, the Wildcats chose.
The No. 6/6 Wildcats (25-6, 15-3 Southeastern Conference) punctuated the regular season by completing one of the unlikeliest comebacks in recent Kentucky basketball memory. Accepting their coach’s challenge, UK rallied for a 71-70 victory over Florida (19-12, 11-7 SEC) to touch off a wild locker room celebration, complete with bottled water showers all around.
“Overall, we just played hard as a team,” Nick Richards said. “We fought and we just got this W.”
Richards was challenged most directly at halftime. With Richards just 1 for 7 at the break with as many turnovers as points (two), Calipari didn’t try to devise another way to beat the Gators. Instead, he doubled down on the junior big man.
“I know at halftime I said, ‘You are so bad right now,” Calipari said. ” ‘If you play, they’re only going to remember the second half and I’m coming at you. We’re not going away from you. So you can either be the player you’ve been all year or look like this.’ “
Richards responded by making seven of his 11 second-half field goals and scoring 17 points.
“Coach just gave me the challenge to see if I could turn it around,” Richards said. “I took on that challenge.”
He had two baskets within the first four minutes of the second half, but things grew more dire for the Wildcats anyway. Florida built its lead to 18 points with 11:55 left, less than a minute after Calipari briefly thought he had been ejected before learning otherwise. A few minutes later, SEC Player of the Year frontrunner Immanuel Quickley fouled out for just the second time of his UK career.
With Quickley on the bench and Ashton Hagans back in Lexington away from the team for a couple days for personal reasons, it would have been logical to think the Cats lacked the firepower to overcome a 13-point deficit with nine minutes left. UK’s six remaining scholarship players had other ideas.
“Really, we just came together,” Keion Brooks Jr. said. “We said, ‘We got 12 minutes and just go out and fight and compete and leave it all out on the floor.’ We knew we had enough time to come back. We believed in each other. The coaching staff kept believing in us, so we just went out there and left it all on the floor.”
Richards did his thing, Tyrese Maxey ran the show, Johnny Juzang hit a clutch 3 down the stretch, Nate Sestina crashed the offensive glass, and Brooks reminded everyone of his talent and paid off a season of hard work. He scored seven of his 10 points in the final 8:34, playing so well that Coach Cal dialed his number when UK forced a shot-clock violation with less than 30 seconds left and had a chance to take its first lead.
“Coach was in the huddle,” Brooks said. “He said I’ve been playing my butt off the past few minutes. I was getting good shots and good looks, so he said he was going to come to me. Johnny threw me a great pass to open up the baseline. I shot it.”
The look was a good one, but just missed. Enter EJ Montgomery, whose tip-in was originally called off for basket interference. The play was overturned upon replay review and the Cats had the lead, which survived two Florida possessions in the final 11 seconds.
With the win, the mood around the program has undergone as dramatic a shift as it did after UK blew a 17-point lead Tuesday against Tennessee. Instead of going into the SEC Tournament on a two-game losing streak, the Cats will start the postseason riding the high of an emotional win.
Inside the program, the feeling hasn’t changed as much as you might think. Saturday might have brought the most dramatic moments of the season, but it didn’t reveal anything the Cats didn’t already know about themselves.
“Honestly, like what I’ve been saying since the beginning of the season, this team has a will to win,” Richards said. “It doesn’t really matter how much we’re down by, we’re going to fight. We’re going to find a way to win. We’re going to get stops. We’re going to make hard buckets, easy buckets. We’re going to do whatever it takes to win. That’s just us.”
That’s how you cap a regular season ????#NotDone #BBN pic.twitter.com/Ce3NmJt5U1
— Kentucky Basketball (@KentuckyMBB) March 8, 2020
