Mo Dioubate would like to celebrate a win at Alabama Saturday. (Vicky Graff Photo)
Mouhamed Dioubate spent the first two years at Alabama before transferring to Kentucky. Dioubate will return to Tuscaloosa when the Wildcats take on the Crimson Tide on Saturday in the Southeastern Conference opener for both teams.
“Mo had a great run there (and) I think it’s kind of par for the course,” Kentucky coach Mark Pope said of Dioubate’s return to Alabama earlier this week. “It’s just ever-present in college basketball. I think it’s just a part of the framework that we work in. I don’t think it’ll have a huge impact.”
In his first season with the Wildcats, Dioubate has started seven of the team’s 13 games and is averaging 12.3 points and 6.4 rebounds per game. He missed five games because of a high ankle sprain. He scored 14 points and grabbed 12 rebounds in a win over Indiana earlier this month.
It will mark the second homecoming of some kind for Dioubate this season. The Queens, N.Y., native scored 10 points in Kentucky’s loss to Michigan State at Madison Square Garden.
Following his transfer to Kentucky, Dioubate said he wasn’t looking forward to returning to Coleman Coliseum.
“That’s probably the only thing about it,” he said last summer. “It’s just basketball at the end of the day. We all compete, and we all have a goal we all want to reach. Hopefully, the fans and the people respect it. It’s a basketball decision.”
2 Responses
Mo-D needs to play the 3. We need to play tall ball and feed the post and have 3 glass eaters with Oweh crashing the offensive glass. We would be unstoppable. With Lowe/Oweh/Mo-D/JQ/Moreno we could play volleyball on the glass. We would also be impossible to score on. I would run a 1-1-2-1 defense and shut every team down. Have Lowe up top Oweh behind or beside him with 3 monsters rotating. Then after about 7-8 minutes of running bring in Johnson/Chandler/Aberdeen/Noah/Williams. To run the other team and shoot 3s
There is not any SIX players that Ky could put on the floor at one time that would be unstoppable on defense or offense.
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