Oscar Tshiebwe continues to produce for UK. Can he get enough help before it’s too late?

It was a familiar sight on Wednesday night, and has been for the last one-and-a-half seasons of Kentucky basketball: Oscar Tshiebwe situated around the rim, scraping for loose balls, swallowing up rebounds and fighting through contact for second-chance baskets.

Watch it happen enough times and you can take it for granted, even though what Tshiebwe is doing continues to be historic.

Kentucky’s 89-75 loss at Missouri to begin SEC play on Wednesday wasn’t without its positive moments, although most of them were connected to UK’s star forward and the reigning national player of the year.

Tshiebwe put in a titanic shift against the Tigers: 23 points and 19 rebounds while playing every second of the game.

He shot 17 free throws and finished with an absurdly high efficiency rating of 33, all while serving as the hub and primary option for a Kentucky offense that looks bereft of ideas when he doesn’t carve out the space to receive a pass.

It was the fourth time this season that Tshiebwe had at least 15 points and 15 rebounds in a game for Kentucky. The Cats are 1-3 in those games, winless if you take out a home matchup with North Florida.

Tshiebwe may not be the current favorite to win the national player of the year award again this season, but he continues to compile stats that would make every post player in the country envious: Wednesday was Tshiebwe’s SEC-leading sixth double-double of the season, in just 10 games played. He now has 34 double-doubles in 44 career games at UK.

This has been laid out in detail to propose the following question: Is there enough help around Tshiebwe — or can John Calipari create enough — to ensure that UK’s generational inside presence leaves Lexington with some measure of vindicating team success?

Kentucky’s offensive and defensive limitations with Tshiebwe

At times when Calipari talks about Tshiebwe’s presence on this Kentucky team, it can sound like a burden, something the Cats must carry as a weight upon their shoulders.

Wednesday night was one of those times.

“Well, we’re different because we got Oscar (Tshiebwe). You could say well, let’s just come down and have everybody out on the floor. You have Oscar. So you got to play a little different,” Calipari said postgame when addressing the challenges of finding cohesive lineups this season. “The issue becomes if they don’t play a couple of the guys on the floor. Now Oscar’s got three guys around him. That’s an issue for us.”

Now 12 games into the season, the scouting report is out on how Kentucky plays on offense: Funnel the ball inside with a gravity-like presence to Tshiebwe, and allow him to dictate whether the possession ends with a close-range shot or a kick out to a player on the perimeter.

Problems naturally arise when opponents don’t respect Kentucky’s outside shooters and defenders collapse on Tshiebwe, hardly giving him time to read or react with the ball in his hands.

“They were just coming, kept coming. That’s how it was,” Tshiebwe said of Missouri’s defensive pressure.

“I told them at halftime. ‘Come down and throw him the ball,’” Calipari recounted. “What happens (is) he’s open. It’s a dogfight in there. So if you go like this and then try to pass it to him. That guy’s fighting to get around. He’s fighting to keep them behind. There were opportunities to throw it in and do that.”

The alternative issue was on display Wednesday: UK got plenty of open three-point looks — especially during the first half — but the Wildcats missed the majority of them.

“We had like five wide-open shots and didn’t make them,” Calipari said. “That takes the wind out of your sails, and you don’t have to make them all, but how about for 1-for-5 or 2-for-5?”

Statistically, Kentucky shapes up well as a team with floor-spacing potential. Entering the opening round of league games, the Cats shot an SEC-best 39.9% on three-pointers.

This argument falls apart quickly, though.

The Wildcats are a combined 36-for-109 (33%) from distance against Michigan State, Gonzaga, Michigan, UCLA and Missouri, the five most prominent teams Kentucky has faced this season.

UK is 1-4 in those games, with Tshiebwe averaging 17.2 points and 16.4 rebounds per contest.

If a point of diminishing returns hasn’t been found yet for Kentucky in these games, the Cats are close to it.

Perhaps even more concerning is Calipari’s reliance on this being the solution for Kentucky’s offense.

Missouri is a high-flying, high-scoring team, willing to launch three-pointers and play extremely fast. The Tigers average less than 16 seconds per offensive possession.

If Missouri had things its way, Wednesday night was to be an up-and-down track meet, a transition battle instead of an interior fight.

Calipari thought that’s what he wanted too.

“I liked the fact that they were going to spread the court on us, because I thought we could get run downhill and get threes. And we did and we missed them all,” Calipari said. I thought this was the game we wanted to play, but they did a good job in the end.”

Defensively, things are more nuanced.

Playing Tshiebwe together with another true big like Lance Ware or Ugonna Onyenso has shown to be a liability, especially when UK’s bigs are placed into rotation.

This isn’t great considering that a Ware-Tshiebwe frontcourt combination has played more than 20% of available minutes for Kentucky over the last five games.

Jacob Toppin’s underwhelming season so far has seen the senior suffer a steady decrease in minutes as well: Toppin played a season-low 12 minutes in the Missouri defeat.

Given his rebounding prowess, Tshiebwe remains most useful on defense when anchored near the basket, which obviously leaves him susceptible to versatile big men with perimeter shooting ability, something that’s magnified when his frontcourt partner also lacks the mobility to close down shooters.

Tshiebwe’s defensive limitations were on display Wednesday, when 6-8 Missouri senior Kobe Brown lit up UK for 30 points, including 4-of-8 shooting from behind the arc.

And while Tshiebwe may seem indestructible during the flow of games, it’s important to remember this is still a player coming off offseason knee surgery, which forced him to miss most of Kentucky’s preseason and its first two regular season games.

“He’s still not where he was a year ago,” Calipari admitted Wednesday.

Kentucky’s options to provide Oscar with more help

How can Kentucky give Tshiebwe more help before it’s too late, and help him leave Lexington with significant team success?

A right-hand injury and potential finger dislocation suffered by CJ Fredrick during the first half of Wednesday’s game won’t help, and neither will the recent downturn in shooting from Antonio Reeves, who has missed 16 of his last 21 three-point shots over the last four games.

The most reliable perimeter presence for the Cats has been freshman guard Cason Wallace, one the nation’s best three-point shooters this season who went 5-for-13 from distance against Missouri and scored a career-high 27 points in UK’s previous game.

Calipari has also recently discussed potentially downsizing the Kentucky lineup, but what defensive ramifications would that have if opponents counteract it by going big?

The 89 points Missouri scored Wednesday were the most UK has allowed this season, and the most the Wildcats have given up since Duke piled on 118 points in November 2018.

For all the good Tshiebwe accomplished individually last season, little team success came with it.

The Cats went 14-4 in league play but failed to win the SEC crown, crashed out of the SEC Tournament without making the title game and suffered a historic defeat in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

Projections on BracketMatrix.com — a composite of dozens of online Bracketology predictions — currently have Kentucky as a No. 5 seed for this season’s NCAA Tournament, but that was before Wednesday’s eye-opening defeat to Missouri.

For his part, Tshiebwe — always an insightful interview — offered his potential solutions for getting this Kentucky season back on course Wednesday night.

“We’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got special talents, we’ve just got to come together as a team,” Tshiebwe said. “We’ve got to know when we got to take a good shot, we’ve got to know when we’ve got to slow it down. Because it seems like we’re kind of rushing into many, many shots. But we’re going to get there.”

How far away are the Cats from their ideal brand of basketball?

“No,” Tshiebwe immediately replied when asked if team chemistry is where it needs to be.

“We’ve got to be stronger. We cannot just let people come in and try to bully, bully, bully us like little kids. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to get better.”

Next game

Louisville at No. 19 Kentucky

When: Noon Saturday

TV: CBS

Radio: WBUL-FM 98.1

Records: Louisville 2-11, Kentucky 8-4

Series: Kentucky leads 37-17

Last meeting: Louisville won 62-59 on Dec. 26, 2020, at the KFC Yum Center in Louisville

This story was originally published December 29, 2022 at 7:54 AM.

Cameron Drummond

Lexington Herald-Leader

859-242-5257

Cameron Drummond works as a sports reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader with a focus on Kentucky men’s basketball recruiting and the UK men’s basketball team, horse racing, soccer and other sports in Central Kentucky. Drummond is a second-generation American who was born and raised in Texas, before graduating from Indiana University. He is a fluent Spanish speaker who previously worked as a community news reporter in Austin, Texas. Support my work with a digital subscription