Kentucky has now won back-to-back games in very similar fashion, and it’s all thanks to “smash mouth basketball,” as Mark Pope says. Against Indiana, the Wildcats shot just 3-15 from three-point range, but found other ways to score and forced an Indiana team coming off an historic offensive performance to just 60 points, as well as a season-low in threes, 4-24, and a season-high 18 turnovers, which they converted 23 points off of. Most of that damage was done in the second half. Well, it was more of the same this Saturday in Atlanta.
The Wildcats had a rough offensive showing in the first half, allowing St. John’s to force 11 turnovers and convert 16 points off of them. Kentucky also shot 1-6 from three. Without Jaland Lowe for all but the first three minutes of the first half, the Wildcats really missed him, but when he came back in early in the second half, it made a world of a difference, as the offense found life, and that energy translated in every phase of the game. Kentucky was down by five with 14:23 left, before a massive 14-0 run accompanied by impressive defense helped catapult Kentucky to a huge win, going up by as much as 15 points from then on. Kentucky went 3-10 from three in the final half, but shot 14-16 from the line, had 11 points off turnovers, and 22 points in the paint. On defense, they held the Johnnies to just 2-10 from three, won the rebounding battle, and allowed no fastbreak points, as well as no field goals in an eight-minute span in that half.
It wasn’t there usual way of winning. Instead of relying on the three-point shot to go in, this Kentucky team has found other ways to be effective, and Rick Pitino says it’s a credit to Mark Pope willing to change this team’s identity…