The start of a special season? John Clay and Mark Story discuss UK’s win over Duke.
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Game day: No. 19 Kentucky 77, No. 6 Duke 72
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Tuesday night’s men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Duke at the 2024 Champions Classic in Atlanta.
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The day after Kentucky basketball’s 77-72 win over the Duke Blue Devils in the Champions Classic, sports columnists John Clay and Mark Story discussed Mark Pope’s first big win as the Wildcats’ coach.
John: Mark, we were both at State Farm Arena to cover Kentucky’s win over Duke. Did it go the way you thought it would go?
Mark: I picked Duke to win that game by four points, and I thought Kentucky had a chance. But no, I can’t say it went exactly the way I thought it would go. The first half, I thought Kentucky, after it hit its first five 3-pointers, played its worst half of the season. Obviously, some of that is you’re taking a big step up in competition, but in the second half, I give Mark Pope a lot of credit.
In fact, in my column this morning I wrote that I thought Kentucky’s coaching in this game was really effective. He got them settled down at halftime, and I thought they came out and were much more patient with their offense, and actually sort of stayed within their structure of what they try to do. And then I just thought they wore Duke down. A key player cramped up and Duke shot horribly in the second half. And I think a lot of that was Kentucky using a nine-player rotation, maybe an eight-player rotation, mostly in the second half, but I thought Pope wore them down.
It actually reminded me a little bit of the 1998 game between Kentucky and Duke in the NCAA Tournament. UK famously rallied from 17 down in the last 10 minutes to win the game in the Elite Eight. And I thought in that game, Kentucky wore Duke down. I thought it was the same thing last night.
John: That ‘98 team was a Tubby Smith team, but it was Tubby Smith’s first year. They were basically Rick Pitino’s players, though I think Tubby put his own stamp on that team. But I did get that feeling last night watching Kentucky. Not so much that they did a lot of full-court press trapping. They did shoot a lot of 3s, but Pope played 10 players in the first 10 minutes, or seven minutes, or whatever it was. They looked like some of those Kentucky teams with Pitino that Mark played on that were playing a lot of guys.
Mark: I thought Kentucky even got into Cooper Flagg’s legs a little bit, and maybe that explained some of the problems he had in the last minute of the game.
I thought there were two guys who really played well for Kentucky down the stretch. Obviously, Andrew Carr, and again I give Mark Pope credit. He found a matchup that was working for Kentucky, and went to it, and Carr was just huge down the stretch of that game. He’s a guy who had played against Duke four times in the past (while at Wake Forest) and broke even and had played well. He seemed to bring that confidence into this game. And Otega Oweh was just tremendous. He made a huge play. I actually thought in real time he was guarding Cooper Flagg on that steal, but he actually came from off the ball to double team and just took the ball away. Then he made the humongous pressure-packed free throws to give Kentucky a two-point lead, and he got the offensive rebound off the missed Lamont Butler free throw that basically clinched the game.
John: The other thing that impressed me about Kentucky was it got down 10 points in the first half. It was down by as many as nine, I believe, in the second half. I think they trailed by five with nine minutes to go. They kept hanging around. I kept thinking Duke’s going to get another little spurt here and win by 10, 12, 14 points. That never happened.
Kentucky stuck around, stuck around, and kind of reminded me the whole thing about when teams want to pull an upset in football. The coach will say, “If we could just keep it close to the fourth quarter, maybe we can make some plays at the end to win the game.” I thought Kentucky showed a lot of resilience. How much of that do you think goes back to this is an older team, this is a mature, experienced team?
Mark: I think that’s a big part of it. I think these guys, they’ve been through everything you can go through. I think that paid off last night, because Duke was in control for a good part of the game. But, as you say, Kentucky kept fighting, and they just wouldn’t go away. And eventually, that relentlessness and that perseverance and coupled with the fact that they were able to wear Duke down physically, that paid off.
I don’t think there’s any question that Duke had the most physically talented team in that game last night, but Shaheen Holloway and Greg Kampe told me that the most physically talented team doesn’t always win.
John: OK, so I wrote in my column about whether this changes our perception of this team. I don’t think we knew exactly what to expect, but this team was picked to finish eighth in the SEC. I think they were 23rd in the AP preseason poll. I think there was kind of that perception that Mark Pope had put together a good roster, a roster of good players. But there was a question about are there any great players on this team? Are there any surefire NBA prospects on this team? With the outcome last night, do you feel like it maybe has a higher ceiling than maybe we thought before?
Mark: It doesn’t for me, because I was always higher on this team than the national perception. I don’t know that this is a Final Four team. I still don’t know if the talent ceiling, so to speak, is that, but I think it will be a really good team. I guess, to me, the realistic aspiration for this season was put in an exciting style of play, win some rivalry games, and just win some games in the SEC Tournament and win some games, plural, in the NCAA Tournament. And I think this team can accomplish those goals.
John: One thing I thought after the game, when you sit back and look at both those teams, they’re different in makeup. Duke is relying a lot on freshmen. They’re going to get better. They’ll get better as the year goes along. But Kentucky, even though they’re an older team, I would think that they’ll get better as the year goes along, too. I think Mark has done a tremendous job of getting this team to jell so quickly. But still, they didn’t know each other until they got together in the summer. I would imagine they’re still learning about each other’s games, just as Mark is learning about them. I think they’ve got room to grow, as well.
Mark: I think you touched on it. I think through greater cohesion and familiarity, this team does have upside. I’m hesitant to draw any lasting conclusions from the Champions Classic, because I remember the Zion Williamson year when Duke won 118-84, By Calipari standards, that was an older Kentucky team. I wrote a column about how Duke has all these fabulous freshmen, and they’re already so much better than Kentucky. And then both those teams went on to get beat in the Elite Eight. So I’m hesitant to overdraw conclusions from this, but I do agree that I think there is, even though Kentucky is very much an older team, I do think there’s some upside for the reasons we’ve touched on in terms of becoming more cohesive.
John: I think one thing for sure, after watching last night, I think this has a possibility of being a special team and a special season.
Mark: Our friend Jeff Drummond from Cats Illustrated has been saying that this felt to him like kind of the early ‘90s Pitino teams. And I think there’s something to that. I do think it’s kind of a similar feeling. They have to do an appropriate amount of winning, obviously, but I think this does have a chance to be a really popular Kentucky team and kind of a special season.
This story was originally published November 14, 2024 at 6:00 AM.
