Kentucky basketball has hit a speed bump. Mark Pope breaks down the loss at Clemson.
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Game day: Clemson 70, No. 4 Kentucky 66
Click below for more of the Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com’s coverage of Tuesday night’s SEC/ACC Challenge men’s basketball game between Kentucky and Clemson in Clemson, S.C.
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The No. 4-ranked Kentucky Wildcats (7-1) suffered their first loss of the season Tuesday night, falling 70-66 at Clemson (8-1) as part of the SEC/ACC Challenge in Clemson, S.C.
UK’s high-flying offense was held in check by the Tigers, a projected NCAA Tournament team this season and a group coming off an Elite Eight appearance last season.
Kentucky went a paltry 7-for-27 (26%) from 3-point range — including a stretch of nine-straight misses near the end of the game — and the Wildcats also made only 61% of their shots from the free-throw line (11-for-18).
First-year coach Mark Pope’s team was led in scoring by junior guard Otega Oweh (17 points), but it was a slog of an offensive performance from most UK players. Only fifth-year guards Lamont Butler (16 points) and Jaxson Robinson (12 points) joined Oweh as double-digit scorers for the Cats.
Clemson senior forward Ian Schieffelin dominated on the glass for the Tigers with a career-best 20 rebounds, the most by an opposing player against UK in more than a calendar year. Schieffelin also added 11 points despite missing 16 shots during the game, which ended in a court storming of Clemson fans at the Tigers’ Littlejohn Coliseum.
Clemson’s victory was the only win by an ACC school on the first night of this year’s SEC/ACC Challenge, with SEC schools winning the other nine games that were played and winning the challenge in the process.
Following the game, Pope met with reporters in Clemson to discuss his first defeat as UK’s head coach and where the Wildcats can improve from here. Kentucky next plays No. 7 Gonzaga (7-1) on Saturday night in Seattle.
Here’s everything that Pope said.
Opening statement.
… (Clemson) put forth a terrific effort, they had a good environment, came (away) with a great win. I’m proud of our guys’ effort and we’re excited to keep growing and getting better.
Question about if Kentucky was affected by the physicality of the game.
Yeah, it’s one of the things that Clemson does really, really well. BG (Brandon Garrison) is just coming back from an injury, we’re trying to keep him in really short, limited runs, trying to keep him as fresh as we could. Tough matchups for him.
But yeah, it was a really physical game. It’s a credit to them, it’s how they play. Their bigs are relentless with their physicality in terms of working the post and in terms of ducks away from the ball, point to post and transition. They run some nice little low back screen actions for them, and so the game gets really physical.
Question about if Kentucky was physical enough against Clemson.
Listen, we finished the first half down 10 on the glass. We were down 10-to-1 in terms of points off of the offensive glass (second-chance points), and it was pretty much the difference in the game. So our challenge was to go in the game in the second half and try to win the rebounding battle.
We came up one shy, it’s probably what we came up short in the game, too. So I was proud of our guys’ response, but it’s a process for our guys to take film and words and understand what that feels like and what it means. So the most important thing for us is to continue to grow in that area.
Question about if UK’s early defensive rebounding struggles impacted UK’s ability on offense, especially in transition.
Yeah, there were a few things. One was our inability to rebound the ball. Two was (Clemson) does a nice job jamming the ball. Three was dealing with foul issues with Lamont (Butler) in the first half and then with Andrew (Carr) in the second half. So, there were a lot of different things, both circumstances of the game and what Clemson does, that made it more difficult to play with the pace that we traditionally want to.
And then, interestingly enough, something really interesting happens: Sometimes when you get sped up, you actually get slowed down. That very much happened to us on the offensive side. That comes with just a growing trust in the way we play and how we execute.
I think we’ll be really disappointed with ourselves in how we tried to ring the bell on the offensive side. We tried — out of the goodness of our hearts and the care for our team — to fix a lot of things by ourselves. That’s just not how we play. We’re not a (negative) assist-to-turnover ratio team. That’s not who we are.
All the credit goes to Clemson for creating that environment. But we’re going to get so much better when we trust us. When things get hard, we lean into the trust of how we play and not run away from it.
Question about if it surprised Pope that Kentucky didn’t take a team approach to trying to fix on-court issues.
I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think that. I think the guys, their resolve was great. I think their togetherness was great. It was just their trust. It’s different things.
We didn’t have guys separating on the bench. We didn’t have guys separating on the court. They were leaning on each other and fighting for each other for the whole game. I’m really proud of that.
I mean, to outrebound Clemson by 10 in the second half (23-13) with some limitations with our personnel is a solid accomplishment to do that on the road. Now, we got outrebounded by 10 in the first half (31-21) so we didn’t go away, but it’s just trusting the way we play. It’s not about trusting each other, it’s trusting the way we play.
That’ll come with time. We’re going to face challenges like this where things slow us down. Sometimes it’s going to be intense pressure, not being able to get a catch anywhere. Sometimes it’s going to be physicality. It’ll be a learning process for us, we know we’ve just got to learn fast.
Question about what UK didn’t have when Lamont Butler was on the bench.
Well, … Lamont’s been playing great, and he actually had a pretty good game cooking to start this game. One of the things that every coach struggles with is you never want to foul your own guy out. And I probably did that a little bit with Andrew tonight. Probably needed to play him with two fouls in the first half.
I probably could have done a little bit more with Lamont. Late in the first half, I made what turned out to be a very poor miscalculation. We had gone on a little run and so I went small thinking that I could save (Carr) and save Ansley (Almonor) a second, and that went really bad.
In hindsight, maybe I roll the dice and play those guys a little bit more in the first half. That’ll be something we’ll argue about and have no answer for. Philosophically, I don’t want to foul my own guys out.
Question about Kentucky’s poor free-throw shooting.
It wasn’t any one guy, it was just a bunch of guys not shooting terrific. It’s something that we’ll continue to work on and focus on and our guys step up to the line and they shoot it and we’ll continue to get better in that area.
Question about what Pope learned about his team on Tuesday.
I’ll go back to what I kind of said. Where my mind is right now is I learned that we have unbelievable resolve. We have unbelievable togetherness. We have the toughness to come compete and try and make things better.
We are going to continue to learn to trust how we play. You know, offensively and defensively we got a little bit out of character trying to make things better and we didn’t lean into how we play on either side of the ball as much as we want to.
I know that’s a 30,000-foot thing, but that’s where my mind is right now.
Question about Kentucky missing open 3-pointers late in the game.
… We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about makes and misses. We’re thinking about shots and offensive rebounds. And earning shots for each other. We never got to a great flow, again credit Clemson for that. We never got to a great flow, we didn’t spend a lot of time looking like us.
A lot of that is credit to Clemson for creating the environment, and then a lot of it was us not knowing how to surgically attack that yet.
Question about Pope feels his team handled the road atmosphere at Clemson.
Well, it’s Kentucky. It’s everyone’s Super Bowl. This is our guys’ first experience in here. It won’t ever get easier. So, this is why you come here, this is why you put on this jersey, so you can do that, you can be everybody’s Super Bowl.
It’s an honor, but it also requires us to be great and tonight we weren’t quite great enough.
This story was originally published December 4, 2024 at 1:33 AM.
