Perhaps something good can come out of Kentucky’s embarrassing loss to Gonzaga?
By just about any measure, what happened on the basketball court at the Spokane Arena on Sunday night was a failure for the Kentucky Wildcats.
Maybe what happened a few minutes after Gonzaga’s 88-72 dismantling of the Cats could be a small step toward future success?
To understand the relevance of what was said immediately after that loss to the Zags, it’s important to flash back a few days to the aftermath of Kentucky’s defeat to Michigan State in the Champions Classic.
As they did Sunday night, the Cats made plenty of mistakes against the Spartans, yet still found themselves with ample opportunity to win that one down the stretch, ultimately falling 86-77 in double overtime. Two days later, Kentucky defeated South Carolina State by 43 points. And before that game, John Calipari revealed a frustration with his team, singling out Cason Wallace — who had missed two key free throws and committed some costly turnovers late — as a bright spot amid the letdown.
“I sent them a message about humility, about shared responsibility,” Calipari said on his pregame radio show Thursday night. “That (Michigan State) game ended — I can go in as a coach, which I’ll do in a game like that, and say, ‘I could’ve done things different.’ But how many of those guys walked in and said, ‘I missed free throws. We could’ve won this game.’ Cason did. How many other guys said, ‘I missed two layups. I missed 1-footers. We would’ve won the game if I would’ve made those two 1-footers.’”
No one else did that, was the implication.
“We got guys that are still trying to protect themselves,” Calipari continued. “You can’t be a great teammate if you’re not gonna make yourself vulnerable. And if you do, the other guys are gonna say, ‘It’s not your fault.’ Because we got good guys. But it’s gotta come out of your mouth. ‘My fault.’”
At that point, Calipari challenged his players to hold themselves accountable to their teammates. He wanted them to look in the mirror, find the blame in their own game, and be honest with their fellow Wildcats about what they’d done wrong and what they could do to make things right moving forward.
That attribute was somehow lacking on this team, even with so many veterans on the roster.
Calipari said coaches will ultimately take the blame publicly for what goes wrong in a game, but players also need to shoulder their share. Not necessarily publicly, but within the team structure.
Following the Michigan State loss, Calipari said he had one player who reached out to a member of the coaching staff wanting to see his mistakes on film.
“One. One!” Calipari said, clearly still agitated by the lack of responsibility two days later. “That’s the next level for us — having a team full of guys that want to see the tape. That know they’re wrong. They’re not evaluating another player or the coach or officials. … What about you? What could you have done to make it different?”
That message seemed to resonate immediately.
After the South Carolina State game, junior forward Lance Ware was asked what he took away from Calipari’s talk.
“I had some dumbass fouls,” he said. “I mean, yeah, it’s the truth. I had bad fouls in overtime. When I watched the tape, I asked myself, ‘Why would I do something like that?’”
When it was clarified that the question wasn’t necessarily to pick on Ware, but to see how he thought the coach’s message could help this team moving forward, he didn’t back down. He had made mistakes, he said. And he was there to own them.
“Coach wants us to hold each other accountable, and to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘What did you do to impact the game?’ Or, ‘What did you do to hurt us in this game?’ I just used myself as an example, because I know what I did,” Ware said.
That’s a start.
“It’s owning your performance every day,” senior guard CJ Fredrick said. “It’s not looking at someone and making excuses. It’s not, ‘Oh, it’s his fault.’ It’s, ‘OK, what did I do wrong? And what do I have to be better at? And I think that’s what we’re going to continue to do as a team, as we grow on this journey.”
Obviously, this team still has quite a bit of growing left to do. That was evident to anyone who saw Sunday night’s game. After it was over, however, the Cats who were made available to reporters owned their shortcomings without prompting.
Senior forward Jacob Toppin criticized his team’s overall play, but multiple times throughout his statements — whenever it sounded like he might be close to placing blame on others — he added a genuine “me included” to his comments, even pointing out specific areas where he needed to be better.
Senior big man Oscar Tshiebwe helped keep Kentucky in the game against Gonzaga, seemingly single-handedly at some points, but — once the game was lost — he took the blame himself. The reigning national player of the year said he wasn’t correctly running the plays that Calipari wanted the team to run, and that threw off his teammates.
“I wasn’t really stepping up like I should,” Tshiebwe said. “Gotta get better. I gotta get better. … Everybody has to be in position, especially me.”
There was plenty of blame to go around after what happened Sunday night. That the team’s two leading scorers — and two expected leaders — would so willingly accept a good chunk of that blame without being asked? That’s not nothing.
The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. This Kentucky basketball team clearly has some problems. The offense looks out of sync, to put it mildly. The defense suffers breakdowns, sometimes at crucial moments. In areas where this UK squad should excel — rebounding and transition play, to name a couple — the results have been inconsistent, at best.
Kentucky’s players seem to be taking Calipari’s challenge to heart, at least. And that’s a jumping-off point. What comes next will be a more difficult endeavor. And this is clearly going to be a process.
Late in the Gonzaga game, at a particularly dire point, Calipari was chewing out one of his players as the Cats walked off the court toward the timeout huddle. The player tried to come at the UK coach with an excuse. Calipari’s reaction was quick and teeming with sarcasm.
“Nooooo, it’s not your fault,” the coach shot back. “Nooooo.”
So, yes, this is a work in progress.
“We’ve got to be great teammates, and then we can be a great team,” Calipari said Thursday night. “We’ve got pieces. But if you’re not great teammates, you’re not going to be a great team. Not happening. Done this a long time.”
Three nights after that, Toppin looked out on a room full of reporters, knowing the reviews of what the Cats had just done in Spokane would not be favorable, acknowledging that something needs to change.
“You guys can say whatever you want,” he said. “But we’re gonna go back, watch film, and understand what we need to get better at.”
Wednesday
North Florida at No. 15 Kentucky
When: 4 p.m.
TV: SEC Network Plus (online only)
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: North Florida 1-2, Kentucky 3-2
Series: Kentucky leads 1-0
Last meeting: Kentucky won 86-52 on Nov. 26, 2021, in Lexington.
