Oscar Tshiebwe, left, and his teammates were in tears after losing to Saint Peter's in the 2022 NCAA tourney. (Vicky Graff Photo)
No one has to tell John Calipari how Kentucky fans felt about his team’s loss to Saint Peter’s in the first round of the 2022 NCAA Tournament. No one has to tell the Kentucky coach how much fans are counting on a much better postseason this year.
So what can he do to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again?
That was one of the first questions he got at Tuesday’s Media Day and one that he spent a lot of non-stop time answering.
“Can’t do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen again. You coach your team and you play a game. You know what’s great? In that game, that team was like my UMass teams, undersized, tough as nails, veteran team, more skilled than you thought, could have been in the Final Four, almost made it to the Final Four,” Calipari said.
“You play a team like that in a one-game shot, stuff can happen. It’s happened to just about every coach you know. So, my thing was, what can you do? The kids got crushed. I was worried with them going in a dark place. Some of ’em were in such a bad place that I had to send guys home to be with families, and it’s the crush that came from that. They had to deal with it.”
“So, for me it was more, ‘Okay, how do I get these guys right?’ And then you use it as fuel. How are you going to guarantee it doesn’t happen again? I’m not going to guarantee it. I can’t guarantee it. I won’t guarantee it.”
That’s fair. No way to guarantee postseason success for Kentucky or any team.
“I will tell you, we have a great group of guys who are great teammates that pick each other up, that challenge each other. And let me say this, that gives you a chance,” Calipari said. “The other means you’re failing. Forget about postseason. You’re not making it. This team is together, talented. I was just with (former Kentucky governor) John Y. Brown today for an hour, and I’ll give you two stories. Okay?”
“So here are the two stories: One, John Y. Brown, we go for an hour. Okay? And we’re talking. He’s telling stories. I’m hearing about Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Celtics. Unbelievable mind.”
And then as I leave the room, he says, ‘Make sure you have 3-point shooters.’”
Well, that has been a weakness of some Calipari teams, so easy to see why Brown said what he did but the good news is that UK does seem to have 3-point shooters this year.
I mean, in the women’s clinic (on Sunday) we had 500 women coming in all excited, working, the kids are working ’em out. One lady gets up and says, ‘The stuff you’re doing, the character you’re teaching, all that stuff, winning and losing, Coach, you don’t have to win another game by what you do to teach these kids,’” Calipari said. “And then two other women say, ‘Yeah, but we want number nine, Coach. It matters.’”
“We know it matters because basketball here carries weight like it did in Pikeville (for the Blue-White Game). Now that was a scrimmage. It wasn’t even a 40-minute scrimmage. It was 30. Seven-thousand people paid, paid to watch a team, and then stayed after to get autographs and pictures. That’s what this team means.”
Calipari won’t put pressure on his team by harping on what Kentucky basketball means to the state.
“We know if you coach here and play here what it means. Now, here’s the thing I’m telling you. I’ll say this word to you people, but my players will never hear it out of my mouth. Bob Rotella comes in, our sports psychologist. He never — we’re not talking championship. We’re talking playing against ourselves and how good can we be,” the UK coach said.
“When your best player, Oscar Tshiebwe, is in the Bahamas and the fifth leading scorer and is cheering harder for his teammates than anyone else, it means you got a chance. We’re talking about how do we become our best by every day playing against yesterday’s performance, how do we get better, how do we get more consistent? We just played that scrimmage. I watched the tape. We stink defensively. What do you think we did yesterday the whole practice? Wow. What do you think we’re doing today and tomorrow? Defense. And I told ’em, and I told some individuals, ‘Look, if you want to play, if you think you’re going to play, you’re not playing. You won’t play.’”
Calipari said he told his players only five of them have to play — and he’s done that with some teams.
“If more of you want to play, you better defend. If you think you’re avoiding contact because you want to shoot balls, you’re not — so we got a lot of work to do to be our best, and that gives you the best chance to go and do what you’re trying to do, not worry about you have to do this,” Calipari said.
“You know what that’s like? You got to win the lottery, Coach. You got to hit the lottery now. Okay. How many of you (in the media) play the lottery? You do when it gets over 500 million. 100 million, it’s not enough for you to play. You’re all laughing because you’re saying it’s true.”
2 Responses
Sometimes teams fall out before their time. Sometimes teams advance beyond their likely level.
Prior to a tournament, there is a reasonable expectation for each team. Some teams have a reasonable expectations of advancing to a particular round. In my experience, if a team falls out 1 round earlier or advances one round later, that can be explained by the usual uncertainties of tournament play. However, is a team falls out 2 or more rounds too early, or advances 2 or more rounds deeper than that team’s reasonable expectation, then that is a noteworthy event.
Last year, UK fell out 2 or more rounds before its level of reasonable expectation. UK is not the first highly-seeded team to sustain such an embarrassing loss in the NCAA tournament. UK won’t be the last.
However, this is not the first Calipari team that has had a post-season performance 2 or more rounds outside its reasonable expectation. For example, the 2014 team "caught fire" in the post-season and nearly everyone celebrated that deep run into the championship game as simply indicia of that team’s true quality, and not an aberration at the season’s end that was out of character with how that team played for most of the season.
Must take the bitter with the sweet at times.
Either 2014 and 2022 are similar in that both teams failed to perform as they had all season, or both teams ended their season in a manner consistent with the team they were at the end. But, I don’t think it is correct to interpret 2014 as a team that finally "showed its true form" at the end while 2022’s ending was a caricature of its true self.
No, Calipari can’t promise that a 2022-type ending will not happen again any more than he can promise that his silly season-long tweaks will change the character of the teams that are struggling to reach the end of a season so they can move on to what really matters, the NBA Draft in June.
Terrific analysis again Professor