Oscar Tshiebwe bailed Kentucky out against Yale. What about the rest of UK’s offense?
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Game day: No. 16 Kentucky 69, Yale 59
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Yale in Rupp Arena.
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A quarter of the way into Saturday’s game, Kentucky was on pace to score 100 points.
What happened?
Well, in one sense, Oscar Tshiebwe happened. And that was the difference for the Cats, who needed an epic flurry of offense from their reigning national player of the year to put away an overmatched Yale team, 69-59, in a game that was closer than the final score.
In another sense, UK’s offense — or lack thereof — is what kept the game close enough to necessitate Tshiebwe coming to the rescue.
Before the midway point of the first half, the Cats’ offense had made nine of 15 shots, they led 23-11, and everything looked to be clicking pretty well. From there, Kentucky made just two of its next 15 shots. During that stretch, UK missed 10 attempts in a row. One brick after another.
Shooting droughts can and will happen, but this was yet another example of a Kentucky team that has often looked out of sorts when trying to score, especially when those attempts come within the halfcourt offense.
“You miss shots, this is what it looks like,” John Calipari said afterward. “… Doesn’t look very good.”
Indeed, it was difficult to watch. And that’s been a common way to describe Kentucky’s halfcourt offense throughout this young season. There’s a lot of basketball ahead of these Cats. And they did start at a relative disadvantage, those late preseason injuries to Tshiebwe and Sahvir Wheeler — setbacks that Calipari has referenced ad nauseam — but that excuse has already been worn out. Nine games in (seven with UK’s two biggest returnees back in the lineup), this simply doesn’t look like an offense capable of winning in the final days of March.
There’s no outward sign of worry on Kentucky’s part just yet.
“I think we’re in the top-15 in efficiency,” Calipari retorted when asked if he was concerned with UK’s halfcourt production.
And that’s close enough to the truth. Kentucky came into the weekend at No. 19 in the KenPom offensive efficiency ratings, though that number is weighted somewhat off the previous season’s play, and — whatever the numbers might say — the actual product on the court isn’t easy on the eyes for long periods. And that happened again Saturday.
Stopping Kentucky’s offense
Opposing teams are clearly trying to do a couple of things defensively against these Wildcats.
First, keep them out of transition.
Calipari has stressed that he wants this UK team to run as much as possible. Get the ball and go. Obviously, rival coaches acknowledge the disadvantage to their teams and will try to slow Kentucky down.
“You certainly want to limit that,” Yale Coach James Jones said after Saturday’s game, when UK got eight fast-break points. Jones added that one of his assistants coined the phrase, “Our shots are their first pass into their transition,” to convey that Kentucky will always look to fly down the court in the other direction. The lesson: make sure you’re taking good, smart shots to limit those chances.
In a way, that’s already a win for a Kentucky team that has played, for the most part, terrific defense so far this season. Good, smart shots are hard to come by, and the Cats’ offensive potential is clearly already on the minds of their opponents before they even start playing defense. Obviously, that approach also limits UK’s chances to do what they do best.
Other teams will simply try to force the Cats into the halfcourt, because they know that’s their best chance to beat Kentucky. And once they get them there, the focus becomes Tshiebwe.
“You want to try to deny Tshiebwe the ball, and make it hard for him every time he catches it,” Jones said, adding that one way his Bulldogs wanted to do that was to double off Jacob Toppin, who’s now shooting 16.7 percent from three this season. “We doubled big on big. The ‘4’ man is not really a great shooter, so you can double off him and not feel like you’re going to give up something easy on the opposite side.”
In the first half Saturday, that worked pretty well. Tshiebwe scored six points.
Then — once Yale took an improbable 35-33 lead early in the second half — the light bulb went off.
Tshiebwe scored five consecutive buckets — two were and-ones, for a total of 12 points — and he made a couple of big defensive plays during the same stretch. His teammates kept feeding him the ball in the paint, and by the time his flurry was finished, Kentucky’s lead was 45-40, and the Cats never trailed again.
“It’s hard to do for 40 minutes without something leaking,” Jones said of limiting Tshiebwe.
Obviously, Oscar is Plan A for this UK team.
“We have an advantage, and the kid’s name is Oscar Tshiebwe,” Calipari said. “You gotta throw it to him. If you’re driving and he’s open, don’t shoot it — throw it to him. The crazy thing is: if he can’t shoot it, he’ll throw it back to you, which he does.”
And when that happens, other Cats need to make shots. Several have shown they can be offensive spark plugs. But all of those same players have also shown they can disappear. And that makes finding a consistent Plan B and Plan C difficult, for those times when UK won’t be able to rely wholly on Tshiebwe.
Freshman Cason Wallace has been great this season, and he scored eight points in the first five minutes of Saturday’s game. He never scored again. Wheeler can get buckets, but he needed 14 shots to get 10 points Saturday, finishing with just one assist, unable to break the Cats out of their halfcourt funk. Antonio Reeves led UK in scoring coming into the game, but he’s had trouble maintaining consistency. Reeves made three shots Saturday. Toppin scored four points. CJ Fredrick didn’t score at all.
It was just one game, but elements of this inconsistency have been there all season.
Calipari remains unconcerned.
“No, I mean, if I thought we were really struggling, yeah, I’ll look at new things,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you. These guys will tell you if you ask them, ‘How much does he come in and adjust stuff? How much does he change?’ They’ll all say, ‘Ah, sheesh.’ If I don’t like something, I throw it out, we try something new. The whole season is that way.
“Again, making shots is part of it because it really makes your offense look really good when you make shots. When you miss 10 in a row, ‘What is wrong with this offense?’ You got a good shot, you just happened to miss it.”
UK staying the course
Kentucky’s players share Calipari’s lack of panic.
Tshiebwe said he thinks that sometimes the Cats get a little too comfortable following a big offensive flurry — like the 25 points they scored in the first 10 minutes Saturday — and get a little complacent.
“We just gotta stay focused. And trust ourselves,” he said. “Coach has got great things for us. We’ve got great plays that we can run, and we can score all the time. We’ve just gotta stay more focused. And we have to make sure we communicate better. And we’re gonna be fine.”
Wheeler also referenced UK’s offensive efficiency ratings when asked about halfcourt troubles.
“I think we’re doing some pretty good stuff,” he said.
The UK point guard acknowledged that the Cats need to stay focused on moving the ball to get good shots. And, most importantly, they need to hit the open shots when they come. If they can prove they can — and they can also continue to run things through Tshiebwe — the results will be there.
“At the end of the day, I think that’s what you gotta decide what you’re gonna do,” Wheeler said. “You going to let Oscar score every time or are you going to let some guys that can make some shots make shots? And it’s a hard thing — you gotta pick your poison.”
Until some other Kentucky players can come close to matching Tshiebwe’s consistency, opposing teams will continue to focus on keeping the Cats clamped down in transition and making things difficult for their biggest star inside. Time will tell how this goes.
“I hope you could see we’re executing better,” Calipari said. “But we don’t make every shot. And there’s sometimes you look discombobulated. Well, part of it is you’re playing a team, and they’re maybe doing something defensively that you’re not used to. And then you got to talk ’em through it. Got a really smart team. Got a skilled team. …
“We motion and movement. But we are so fast, we are trying to get to where we’re flying if it’s not there. We’re playing. And we’re working on it. We’re getting better.”
Next game
No. 16 Kentucky vs. No. 19 UCLA
What: CBS Sports Classic
Where: Madison Square Garden in New York City
When: About 5:15 p.m. Saturday
TV: CBS-27
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Kentucky 7-2, UCLA 8-2
Series: Kentucky leads 8-7
Last meeting: UCLA won 83-75 on Dec. 23, 2017, at the CBS Sports Classic in New Orleans
This story was originally published December 10, 2022 at 5:26 PM.
