Calipari’s pre-Gonzaga message to his Kentucky team: ‘We beat Michigan State.’ Now what?
Two days after a disheartening double-overtime loss to Michigan State and three days before a trip to face No. 2 Gonzaga, John Calipari talked about the message he has been trying to get his Kentucky basketball team to buy in to moving forward.
“Your mentality is, ‘We beat Michigan State,’” the UK coach said Thursday night. “Where would you be feeling right now?”
Instead of dwelling on that upset loss against the first marquee opponent of the 2022-23 season, Calipari wants his Cats to internalize what went wrong, figure out how to make those things go right, and move past that loss to the Spartans with a winning mindset.
“We didn’t play great,” he said of that game. “Still should have won, could have won. I give credit to Michigan State — Tom Izzo is a great friend — but I want them to have the mentality, ‘You played well enough to win that game. Let’s say you won it. How would you feel going to Spokane right now?’ Because half of this is the mentality. …
“This is the great thing about November, trying to learn about your team. And I still am learning about my team. But I like the group. I liked them after Michigan State.”
Calipari was preaching patience well ahead of the Champions Classic on Tuesday night, and he’ll likely carry that message beyond whatever happens in the Spokane Arena on Sunday night. He talked before the season-opening Howard and Duquesne games like those teams were capable of beating his Cats. UK defeated those squads by 32 and 25 points, respectively. He talked up South Carolina State as a team that could come into Rupp Arena on Thursday night and pull off the upset. The Bulldogs were 41-point underdogs. Kentucky won by 43.
No stranger to sandbagging, especially this time of year, Calipari is taking it to another level this season.
His reasons are pretty clear.
Kentucky has a team capable of getting to its first Final Four in eight years. Calipari clearly thinks he has the pieces to possibly win the program’s second national title in his tenure. But those expectations hit a roadblock as Oscar Tshiebwe, then Sahvir Wheeler, then Daimion Collins were sidelined late in the preseason.
Tshiebwe — the reigning national player of the year — was the last to return to practice. That was Monday. He played 34 minutes — scored 22 points, grabbed 18 rebounds, blocked four shots — the next night, just four weeks after undergoing knee surgery. For those four weeks, Kentucky practiced as an incomplete team, one that looks and plays a whole lot different when Tshiebwe is in the lineup.
So, whatever anyone thinks of the messaging, Calipari wants this Kentucky team looking ahead as a group with plenty still to work on but with plenty of reason for confidence. And the Cats are buying in.
“I feel like we gave the game away,” freshman Chris Livingston said. “We did have the game won — lots of times — but we’re going to learn from the experience. Whether we won or lost. … But it’s next-game, next-play mentality. Just looking ahead and seeing how we can still improve.”
“Yeah, I mean, it’s over with,” junior Lance Ware said. “Some people say we lost, we gave away the game — different things like that. But you can’t go back. You can’t rewind time. Just learn from our mistakes that we made.”
When Kentucky’s schedule was finally released a few weeks before the regular season was set to begin, the placement of the Cats’ game against South Carolina State on Thursday night was perplexing. Playing in the Champions Classic in Indianapolis on a Tuesday and traveling west to play — at the time — arguably the best team in the country that Sunday, with another game in between? Turns out Thursday’s thrashing of the Bulldogs might have been a good thing.
The Cats missed lots of shots and made lots of mistakes against Michigan State. The competition was obviously several notches lower Thursday, but the game gave UK a quick chance to move past the Champions Classic and work out any frustration ahead of the weekend.
“It would have been a lot different if we just had practice and tried to get out there,” Ware said. “But being in front of our home crowd and obviously shooting the ball really, really well tonight — it helped us a lot. Being able to see some shots go in and make some adjustments against live bodies, against live action — it always helps.”
Kentucky vs. Gonzaga
The matchup Sunday in Spokane is still deserving of national attention, but it lost some of its luster when Michigan State beat the Cats on Tuesday and the Zags were run out of the gym at No. 11 Texas the following night.
“They are going to be a lion right now, because they just lost at Texas,” Calipari said. “This will be a hard game for us to win.”
His Cats should have a mighty big chip on their shoulder, too.
Calipari said he originally wasn’t planning to play Tshiebwe against South Carolina State, instead looking to give the big man some rest ahead of the Gonzaga game. But his team looked so out of sync with him back in the lineup that he played Kentucky’s star for 14 minutes Thursday, just to work on some more things against outside competition.
Talk of Tshiebwe vs. Drew Timme — possibly his No. 1 rival for national player of the year honors — began just a few minutes after the buzzer sounded Thursday night.
“I’ve had this before,” Calipari said. “It was Marcus Camby and Tim Duncan. … You would have thought no one else was in the game and there were no coaches. It was one-on-one.”
That was 1995. UMass and Wake Forest were both ranked in the top 10. Camby and Duncan were both first-team All-Americans that season. Camby ended up as national player of the year. Duncan won the award the following season. “A clash of titans,” read the Boston Globe headline previewing the matchup.
And the actual game? Calipari’s Minutemen won 60-46. Camby was 6-for-19 from the field. Duncan was 4-for-18. “The hype of that was ridiculous,” Calipari said Thursday night.
The underlying message here — and another that has been around all preseason — is that this Kentucky team will need other players to step up in big games. And both teams that will be on the court Sunday night have guys capable of stealing the show from each side’s biggest star.
Gonzaga’s oft-celebrated offense looked off Wednesday night at Texas — as it did in a previous one-point win over Michigan State — but Coach Mark Few has most of last season’s roster back, including three returning starters and several players expected to take a big step forward.
Tshiebwe showed zero sign of rust Tuesday night and looked good in limited action Thursday, but Wheeler, Cason Wallace, CJ Fredrick, Antonio Reeves, Jacob Toppin and others on this UK team appear fully capable of a star turn on any given night.
“That’s why people come to Kentucky — to play these big games,” Ware said.
In a game like this, Tshiebwe and Timme will get plenty of attention. But, with that much talent on the floor, you never know who might show up in crunch time. Especially if they have the confidence to do so.
“I’m a competitor. So I live for moments like that, games like that,” Livingston said. “Obviously, I got to get my feet wet against Michigan State. Didn’t have the best performance, but I’m ready to get at ’em. It’s going to be fun. I’m looking forward to it, for sure.”
Sunday
No. 4 Kentucky vs. No. 2 Gonzaga
When: 7:30 p.m.
Where: Spokane (Wash.) Arena
TV: ESPN
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Kentucky 3-1, Gonzaga 2-1
Series: Kentucky leads 1-0
Last meeting: Kentucky won 80-72 on Nov. 27, 2002, at the Maui (Hawaii) Invitational
