Pope says the season will be a ‘race’ for UK basketball. Here’s where they can get better.
Less than 48 hours removed from the biggest victory in his new role as Kentucky’s head coach — beating Duke in the Champions Classic — Mark Pope was already lost in the process of moving on to the next one.
Pope attempted to reference back to something that happened in that 77-72 upset win over the Blue Devils when he stopped speaking, struggling to put his thought in the proper time context.
“Uhh, what day was it, guys?” he asked with a grin, while popping open a fresh Diet Coke. “I have no idea what day today is. Whenever that game was — the last one we played.”
Kentucky beat Duke in Atlanta on Tuesday night. Pope held his weekly press conference Thursday afternoon. And his Wildcats won’t play again until Lipscomb comes to Rupp Arena on Tuesday night, giving them a full week between games at this early stage in the season.
While Pope was asked plenty of questions related to the big victory over the Blue Devils, he didn’t spend much time reveling in the win itself. Instead, Pope talked at length about what his players learned from spending 40 minutes on the court against the No. 6 team in the country and looked ahead at what’s to come.
“There’s a lot we were really proud of,” Pope said of the win. “And there’s so much that we need to work on.”
The UK coach hit on a few areas of emphasis during this semi-break from games after playing three opponents over the first nine days of the regular season.
“We’re excited to kind of continue to work on our defensive punches,” Pope said.
The “punches” he spoke of are the ways in which the Wildcats change their defensive looks over the course of a game, sometimes to throw different challenges at the opposing offense and other times to simply see how the other team will react when UK shifts their defensive look.
“All the different ways that we kind of change up the texture of the game — just schematically, at a moment’s notice,” Pope said. “We’d like to make some progress there.”
Rebounding is perhaps the area of improvement that Pope has been most vocal about in the early going, and that remains on the priority list.
“We would like to continue to grow on the glass on both sides,” he said. “That’s a real big deal for us.”
Pope was less than pleased with Kentucky’s rebounding in the exhibition games and then the season opener against Wright State last Monday, but the Cats dominated the glass in the early going against Bucknell five days later, ultimately outrebounding the Bison 57-35 (with 22 offensive boards) in a 100-72 victory.
In Tuesday night’s matchup with the bigger Blue Devils, his team lost the battle of the boards 45-41, with only nine offensive rebounds (Duke had 12), falling short of his previously stated goals for those lines in the box score. Pope said last week that he’d like the Cats to grab offensive rebounds at a 30% rate and keep opposing teams in the single digits in that stat.
“Offensively, we’d like to continue to get into a space where our guys are able to pay attention — it becomes part of their DNA — where they’re paying attention to how they’re being guarded. And responding accordingly, where it becomes second nature,” Pope continued. “And that’s going to be an all-season-long pursuit. You know, the more we do that, the more aesthetically pleasing we are offensively, and the more effective we are offensively.”
In the win over Duke, the Cats exploited some defensive weaknesses in the Blue Devils’ youngsters down the stretch — with Andrew Carr, specifically, able to make a couple of key and-one plays in the final minutes — and that ultimately helped UK pull out the victory.
“So we got a whole laundry list of things that we’d like to get better at,” Pope finished. “It’s why these games are so great, is because they expose you and teach you where you can be better, and also give you insight into what you’re doing well.”
Kentucky’s upcoming schedule
No wins are guaranteed, but this next stretch of the schedule should be one in which the Wildcats will have opportunities to learn more about themselves with plenty of room for error.
The next four games on UK’s slate (all in Rupp Arena):
▪ Lipscomb on Tuesday night: The Bisons played Arkansas tough in John Calipari’s debut as head coach — they were within four points with less than seven minutes to go before losing 76-60 — and have a 2-2 record after blowing a late, double-digit lead at Belmont on Tuesday night. Lipscomb, which was picked to finish first in the ASUN, plays at Western Kentucky on Sunday.
▪ Jackson State on Friday night: The Tigers are 0-3 on the season heading into Saturday’s game at Vanderbilt and are No. 327 nationally in the KenPom ratings. They’re UK’s only opponent this season that is positioned outside of the top 250 in those ratings.
▪ Western Kentucky on Nov. 26: The Hilltoppers lost to Wichita State and Grand Canyon to open their first season under new head coach Hank Plona before defeating Campbellsville on Tuesday night. WKU was picked to finish second in Conference USA this season.
▪ Georgia State on Nov. 29: The Panthers have also started the season 1-2, with a 35-point loss at Mississippi State, a loss at Jacksonville State and a win over Ball State.
KenPom gives UK at least a 93% chance of winning in all four of those games, and none of them has a predicted margin of victory of fewer than 16 points.
After that stretch, the going gets a lot tougher.
Kentucky will play at Clemson — a projected NCAA Tournament team — on Dec. 3 and travel to Seattle to face No. 4-ranked Gonzaga on Dec. 7. Once the season hits that point, UK will be playing formidable opponents on a weekly basis.
Getting a big win over a marquee foe like Duke before that stretch of the schedule hits certainly isn’t a bad way to start off this basketball journey.
“Hopefully, our confidence is growing all the time,” Pope said. “I think mostly what it gives us is, like, we’re just hungry to grow. You guys hear me — I mean, you’re gonna be so tired of me talking about humility and curiosity, right? But I think that’s the biggest thing is, like, just go play again to find out who we are and how we can get better, and what we can do better, and how we can grow. It’s a race. With a team that’s constructed the way this team had to be — where every single person is new — it’s just a race from our first game on November 4th to, hopefully, the Final Four.
“We know we have to get so much better, and there’s limited time. And so it’s just a race to see how fast we can grow. And so I think that’s the biggest thing that this game did for us — that Bucknell did for us, that Wright State did for us — is it just gave us more film and data and experience to try and figure out how we can become a great team.”
