Tennessee ran Kentucky out of Rupp. What now for the Cats? ‘Find the fight in ourselves.’
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Game day: No. 5 Tennessee 103, No. 10 Kentucky 92
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Saturday’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Tennessee at Rupp Arena in Lexington.
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A little more than 24 hours before Kentucky’s top-10 battle with Tennessee on Saturday night, Adou Thiero looked ahead and outlined what he saw as a major key to the game.
“I think we’ve just gotta come out there and, basically, punch them in the face first,” he said. “Not let them get that first punch off. Show them, like, we’re here to fight. Because we know they’re going to fight back. But we’ve just got to show them: we’re going to do it first.”
Well, that didn’t happen.
No. 5 Tennessee beat No. 10 Kentucky 103-92 in Rupp Arena, an attack on the UK record books that tilted toward the Volunteers’ favor almost as soon as the ball was tipped.
This game was tied for all of 15 seconds before Zakai Zeigler’s 3-pointer rattled around the rim and fell through the net to give Tennessee a 3-0 lead. The Vols never trailed. And for most of the night, they never seemed to be in too much danger of it.
Tennessee scored the first eight points of the game. When Santiago Vescovi hit a 3-pointer to put the Vols up 13-3 with 16:36 left in the first half, John Calipari called a timeout, unable to wait another minute or so for the first TV stoppage of the night.
“We dug ourselves a hole to start off the game,” Thiero said afterward. “If we came out and kept it close at the beginning, then we probably would’ve been fine at the end of the game. But we dug ourselves a hole that we couldn’t get out of.”
Over the Volunteers’ first 10 possessions of the game, they scored 21 points and grabbed five offensive rebounds. They scored on eight of those 10 possessions. By that point, they led 21-10. And they made a habit of being ahead by double figures on this road trip to Rupp.
“We gotta be a little more sound defensively in what we’re doing. And we’re gonna have to be a collective defensive team,” Calipari said afterward. “And I keep saying it. And if one guy stops playing, it’s going to hurt this group. But when we do it together, we can hold our own.
“But you’ve gotta rebound. To start the game — c’mon. They had too many attempts. And just about each one of them, they scored a basket. That’s defense, too, by the way.”
The box score afterward was ugly enough. A scroll through the UK archives was even uglier.
The 103 points scored by Tennessee was the most by a visitor to Rupp Arena since VMI lit up the nets in a 111-103 upset of the Wildcats on Nov. 14, 2008, the opener in Billy Gillispie’s final season at Kentucky.
This was only the fourth time in Rupp Arena history that UK had given up triple digits in a single game, the first instance of it in 15 seasons under Calipari, a typically defense-first coach.
No SEC team had hung 100 on Kentucky anywhere since Arkansas beat the Cats 101-94 in Barnhill Arena on Feb. 10, 1993. The Hogs scored 105 on Kentucky in Rupp the previous year, the only time a UK team had ever surrendered 100 points to an SEC opponent in the building’s 48-year history. Until Saturday night.
And this lackluster effort wasn’t some one-off in an otherwise stellar season, as anyone who’s watched the Wildcats over the past few months already knows. Defense has been an issue all season long. In fact, after Saturday’s onslaught was complete, Kentucky had dropped out of the top 100 nationally in the KenPom defensive efficiency ratings, traditionally the sure sign of a team going nowhere in March.
This loss came three days after Kentucky dropped an overtime game to Florida, losing 94-91. If you throw out the COVID-impacted 2020-21 season — the one where UK went 9-16 and played its home games in front of a capped crowd of 3,075 — this marked the first time in Calipari’s tenure that the Cats had lost back-to-back games on their home court.
In the home game before this two-loss skid, the Wildcats gave up 96 points to Georgia. But the hope of this Kentucky team lies in its offense, and on that night the Cats scored 105 points, another example of the battling factions within this squad. Often, offensively unstoppable. Just as often, defensively inept.
And Saturday was another case of it, in a way.
Rob Dillingham scored 35 points for the Wildcats, making 14 of 20 shots from the field and hitting 6 of 8 attempts from 3-point range, once again shaking and baking with the ball and lighting up the scoreboard.
“Robert kept us in the game,” Calipari said. “In the first half, we were down four because Robert made basket after basket.”
Indeed, Dillingham dropped 17 on the Vols before halftime, almost single-handedly bringing the Cats back from that double-digit deficit to pull within 46-42 at the break.
A minute into the second half, Reed Sheppard hit a 3-pointer to make it 46-45.
Tennessee went on an immediate 13-2 run from there, a collection of straight-line drives, ball movement to get open shots and all other manner of scoring against a UK defense incapable of stopping anything for any sustained period of time. The Cats never got back within seven points.
Calipari lamented afterward that Kentucky surrendered three buckets — seven total points — on three out-of-bounds plays alone, with guys either in the wrong spots or doing the wrong things.
The Kentucky coach said multiple times that he hadn’t lost any faith in this Kentucky team — now 15-6 overall, 5-4 in the SEC, losers in three of the last four games and sure to drop quite a bit from its No. 10 ranking — repeatedly looking toward the future. “Every goal we have is still out in front of us,” he said, often pivoting toward the positive.
He basically acknowledged the motive in that relatively positive tone after this one.
“I don’t want these guys to lose any faith,” he said. “Your confidence does get shaken when you’re young.”
If Calipari wouldn’t say it, his players did.
“I just feel like we didn’t fight as hard as we could,” Dillingham said.
Time and again, especially in the early going, Kentucky’s players bounced off of Tennessee’s when the physicality picked up. The Wildcats were beaten on the boards, and they got pushed around all over the court.
Calipari didn’t dwell on that Saturday night. The Cats do have that electric offense, still good enough to beat anyone in the country on any given night. And, as the UK coach keeps pointing out, the Wildcats have yet to play a game with its full contingent of players. Starting point guard D.J. Wagner was out again Saturday — his second straight missed game due to an ankle injury — and Kentucky is now 0-3 with him on the sidelines.
Calipari said he expects Wagner back soon, but, with only 10 regular-season games remaining, time is running out for this undoubtedly talented team to find its direction on the court. The defense remains a major liability. And Saturday night was another step in the wrong direction.
“We’ve yet to play with our full team. But I’m not making excuses,” Thiero said. “We’re going to figure everything out, find the fight in ourselves. We’re a group of competitors. We don’t like losing, so we’re going to get it figured out.”
Next game
No. 10 Kentucky at Vanderbilt
When: 8:30 p.m. EST Tuesday
TV: SEC
Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1
Records: Kentucky 15-6 (5-4 SEC),Vanderbilt (6-15, 1-7 SEC)
Series: Kentucky leads 155-49
Last meeting: Vanderbilt won 80-73 in 2023 SEC Tournament quarterfinals on March 10, 2023, in Nashville
This story was originally published February 4, 2024 at 1:26 AM.
