Kentucky basketball has a brand new team. How did UK’s first opponent prepare for the Cats?
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Game day: Kentucky 123, Kentucky Wesleyan 52
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader’s and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Wednesday night’s men’s basketball exhibition game between Kentucky and Kentucky Wesleyan in Rupp Arena.
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Less than 48 hours before Kentucky basketball’s first game against outside opposition with Mark Pope as its head coach and with a retooled roster at his disposal, one of UK’s new arrivals was stumped by a question from the Herald-Leader.
Amari Williams — a 7-foot center who arrives in Lexington with a strong defensive reputation, and solid passing chops — was asked if it could be an advantage for Kentucky that the Wildcats are a completely new team this season.
For as much time as Kentucky’s players have spent this offseason learning the idiosyncrasies of one another on the floor, opponents, especially early in the season, will have precious little tape to study of the Cats all playing together.
“I feel like a lot of (opponent scouting) will be off of what we did at our past schools,” Williams — who played in 105 career games across four seasons at mid-major Drexel — said after a pause. “But, that’s different, too. I feel like we all have the same aspects. But, in a different setting (at UK), it’s definitely going to be hard to scout. They’re going to know the shooters, things like that. It’s just, they won’t know the offensive actions to stop, which is good.”
The first team to test this theory rolled into Rupp Arena on Wednesday night and left on the wrong side of a lopsided loss. UK opened the Mark Pope era with a comprehensive 123-52 exhibition victory over Kentucky Wesleyan College.
The NCAA Division II Panthers, from Owensboro, were, as expected, overmatched in just about every way. Nonetheless, the game will always occupy a distinct place in UK basketball history as Pope’s unofficial coaching debut with the Cats.
Kentucky Wesleyan head coach Drew Cooper was the first person tasked with trying to figure out a Pope-led Kentucky team.
How did Cooper approach the challenge?
Kentucky Wesleyan’s unique scouting of the Wildcats included lots of tape of Pope’s teams at BYU, where he coached for five seasons and reached two NCAA Tournaments.
“We did a lot of scouting on their team from last year, a lot of offense from BYU. … It was tough,” said senior forward Edward Jones Jr., who led KWC with 12 points. “They’re physically probably stronger in a lot of cases, but we just tried to play as hard as we can.”
“The scout was ‘Try to go over (all screens).’ All of them can shoot, basically,” added fifth-year guard Kennedy Miles, who was the only other Kentucky Wesleyan player to reach double-digit scoring with 10 points. “They showed that to us today.”
To Miles’ point, Kentucky went a crisp 50% from 3-point range in the game, making 21 of 42 attempts from deep. Seven different UK players made a 3-pointer in the blowout win, with Ansley Almonor and Jaxson Robinson each making five.
In addition to BYU film, Cooper sourced individual highlights of Kentucky’s transfer portal arrivals, which comprise nine of the 12 scholarship Wildcats.
Even by normal exhibition game standards, this would have been a particularly difficult year to gather any early looks of the Cats. That’s because last Friday’s annual Blue-White scrimmage wasn’t televised, as part of its rebranding as an NIL-focused event.
“We tried to find clips of the Blue-White scrimmage, but that wasn’t really out there,” Cooper said.
To further illustrate these unknowns, Cooper said Kentucky Wesleyan’s game prep called for UK to start Dayton transfer Koby Brea. Instead, Pope started former Oklahoma player Otega Oweh, who finished as UK’s second-leading scorer with an efficient 18 points.
“It was just trying to piece together a puzzle and assume they’re going to run some of the same stuff (that they did at) BYU,” Cooper said. “We said, ‘We’re not trying to beat Kentucky tonight. We’re trying to beat the game of basketball.’”
An ocean of talent, and resources, separate UK and Kentucky Wesleyan’s basketball programs. That’s clear.
But the Panthers are respectable within their level of competition. Famously, Kentucky Wesleyan defeated Louisville in an exhibition game last year, and the Panthers return five of six starters from that team. Last season, Kentucky Wesleyan went 21-9 overall and 15-5 in Great Midwest Athletic Conference games, before losing in the first round of the NCAA Division II Tournament.
In the buildup to Wednesday’s exhibition, Pope and his Kentucky players spoke of the need, and desire, to face outside competition. Pope went as far as to say that it’s a “fun thing” to get exposed by exhibition opponents before the real season begins Nov. 4 against Wright State.
“Everybody is playing the same style in our gym,” Pope said this month at SEC Media Day. “So you’re just hungry to get exposed.”
Kentucky Wesleyan didn’t do a whole lot of exposing on Wednesday night. Cooper, who is entering his seventh season as the KWC head coach, repeatedly expressed disappointment in his team’s performance during his postgame press conference.
The only statistical category of note that went the way of Kentucky Wesleyan was offensive rebounds: The Panthers had 10 of those to UK’s nine.
“We’re going to continue to improve on our communication. I felt like we were dialed in for most of the game, (but) we had a couple little spaces where we kind of lost ourselves,” Pope said after his first game on the UK bench. “We were exposed on the glass a little bit. … We can, individually and collectively, where we can see that on film, see us doing it, where we erred in our instinct to go get a hit, and then where we were really successful. I think we can learn and grow from that.”
This story was originally published October 23, 2024 at 10:51 PM.
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