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No excuses from Mark Pope after No. 4 Kentucky lost 70-66 at Clemson Tuesday night.
While he was proud of UK’s fight, togetherness and competitiveness as well as out rebounding by Clemson in the second half after getting beat on the boards by 10 in the first half, he knew his team did not play its best against a physical opponent in its first true road test.
“There were so many plays where we could have functioned more like us. We left so much on the table in terms of decisions we made,” Pope said on his postgame radio show. “Credit Clemson. They put us in a hard environment and we are not quite to that point where we understand how to play through that. We will get there.”
Pope said UK had defensive breakdowns early from “overplaying our hand” in the rowdy environment.
“Sometimes we bailed on things. Sometimes we got pushed out so far that we gave up easy cuts. We were not trusting our defensive principles,” the UK coach said.
Offensively Pope said the Cats were too eager “to fix things on our own” rather than trust each other and the way UK plays.
Kentucky was only 7-for-27 from 3-point range and had more turnovers — 12 — than assists — 11.
“This is why you play these games. We are far from the team we need to be but we need to win these games,” the UK coach said. “We have guys willing to do that and just have to find ways to do that.”
He said the assist-turnover ratio was “really telling” about UK’s decision making. Pope called it a “train wreck” at times with UK’s offense. He said the Cats simply have to play the way they practice and trust the process.
“Our habits and defaults on decision making under duress is something we have made progress on but we have so far to go,” Pope said. “Our ceiling is so much higher than we played tonight.”
6 Responses
This was the worst matchup of all of the ACC teams for Kentucky, especially playing at Clemson. Maybe next year we should have a true road game before we go play a Texas A&M type team on their floor. Clemson played harder and wanted this win more. There was a lot of home cooking from the refs, but that comes with away games. That allowed their defense to be more disruptive and also helped their rebounding. Our free throw shooting has to get better, especially for games like this. It’s apparent that we don’t have confidence in our 3 point shooting in clutch moments. That is where we supposedly had an advantage and did not take advantage of it. Hopefully we will find it before SEC play. Give Clemson credit. They knew the whistles would go their way and they made the most of that. Another observation was the cracker box gym that held 9,000. We had fewer than 500 in attendance and of the remaining 8,500, 6,500 were students who were foaming at their mouths which had an effect on the officiating and on our team. Brea, Kriisa, Garrison, and Almonor were pretty much no-shows. Carr got outplayed. We should have gone to Williams more down low or in a pick and roll to the basket with everyone else behind the 3 point line. We should be getting 10 points every game with alley oops to our bigs. Let’s see how we respond in Seattle. We are going to need more fight, more confidence, and much better bench play. Every team we play from here on will use this game as their blueprint for how to play us. We will have to man-up for the fights that are coming without losing our focus of our gameplan, not expect the whistles to always go our way, and make our free throws…90% free throw shooting would have won this game; but so would have 4 fewer turnovers, or 3 more assists. Now Pope will have their attention. A win against Gonzaga will give this team redemption; a loss will label us as soft. At times it almost seemed like we were thinking…Hey, we’re the Nol 4 team in the country. You should be scared of us. To a man, Clemson believed they were the better team and played "bully ball" to prove it. We must want to win more than the other team, believe that we are the best team on the floor, and play Pope ball. We played Calipari ball last night. Go CATS!!!
Coach should have put in Perry when we started missing Free Throws! His defense could have been any worse than what the guard play was! Perry doesn’t miss and early games should be thought of as a Learning Experience for the freshmen. Conference games are the important ones!
A hard environment should not rattle a team with 7 super seniors. Poor free-throw shooting, poor 3-point shooting, and rebounding beat them. Gave up 20 rebounds to a dude with a 20 inch vertical. Be nice to have Oscar on this team.
Fully agree!
A few players resorted to their pre-UK style of selfish play and caused a disconnected UK group of players instead of the TEAM-1st which Coach Pope has worked so diligently to produce.
I do hope Pope benches those who revert back to their selfish play and goes deep to give everyone a chance to use those minutes to prove they can or can’t be productive.
Robinson & Oweh have 2 of the 3 lowest ANE’s of the players who get the majority of the minutes. That is very costly.
The comments by Pope are exactly the things I wrote to a close friend about the game.
The 11:12 A:TO ratio is NOT the UK-style of BB which Pope has been installing. The loss FULLY belongs to a few selfish players. I hope they come back to the system which elevated UK to #4 & #6 in the human polls and #7 in the extremely accurate ANE rankings.
Just give the team time